WNC under flash flood watch as heavy rains expected to continue through Friday night

Sam DeGrave | The Citizen-Times

ASHEVILLE - Much of Western North Carolina will remain under a flash flood watch through Friday evening due to heavy rain expected to continue throughout the day, according to the National Weather Service.

Forecasters with the weather service say "conditions are favorable for heavy rain showers to pass through the same areas repeatedly" well into Friday night.

This could saturate the ground and lead to flash flooding, which is "a very dangerous situation," according to the weather service.

Though the flash flood watch is set to expire at the end of the day, weather service meteorologist Lauren Carroll said that the mountains can expect to see thunder storms and rain showers through early next week.

"We have a very persistent set up where we're getting a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico transported into our area," Carroll said.

As that moisture moves north, it hits the Blue Ridge Mountains and it's forced higher into the atmosphere, where it condenses creating the necessary conditions for rain, Carroll said.

In much of Western North Carolina during the past few days, that rain has been spotty — pouring one minute, sunny the next.

The brief moments of sunshine may feel nice, but they only increase the intensity of the storms that have been dumping rain on the mountains; they act as "fuel," Carroll said.

“Anywhere we get sunshine, the air near the surface heats up and heat is one of the ingredients needed for showers and thunderstorms,” she said.

A wide swath of the mountains is covered under the flash flood watch extending into Friday night, including Avery, Buncombe, Burke Mountains, Caldwell Mountains, Henderson, Macon, McDowell Mountains, Mitchell, Polk Mountains, Rutherford Mountains, Southern Jackson, Transylvania and Yancey counties.

The weather service warns that flash floods can lead to road closures and even wash away small bridges. In Henderson and Transylvania counties, several roads have been closed due to weather over the last few days.

Buncombe County, however, has no weather-caused road closures as of Friday morning, according to Jerry VeHaun, the county's Emergency Services director.

"Right now we’re in good shape here," he said Friday morning. "We’ve had a few trees down but that’s not unusual when we get rain this heavy.”

Shortly before midnight Thursday, a tree fell across I-40 near the Brevard Road exit, but it has been cleared, as have other downed trees, VeHaun said.

Jimmy Brissie, VeHaun's counterpart in Henderson County, said that the worst of the storm seems to be finished. Heavy rain and flooding Wednesday resulted in dozens of calls for service for everything from downed tress and power lines to stranded motorists who had tried to drive on submerged streets, Brissie said.

Since then, things have calmed down a bit.

“A lot of the flash flooding that we’ve seen over the past two days is starting to subside," Brissie said. "We're not getting as many calls."

Though the flooding is subsiding, the French Broad River is still under a flood advisory, meaning forecasters believe "additional rainfall will likely cause the river to crest just below flood stage" in Asheville and Buncombe County, according to the advisory.

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Brissie said that Emergency Services will be keeping an eye on the river through the weekend, and he urged everybody else to do the same.

At this point, the rainfall swelling the banks of the French Broad is likely to cause what forecasters call "nuisance flooding." But they still advise caution to anybody who might be out near the river, and they ask that parents keep children away from drainage areas and culverts.

The flood advisory for the French Broad is in effect through Saturday afternoon.

It won't be until Sunday that the heavy rain and thunder storms begin to taper off in Western North Carolina, and the weather service predicts that they'll continue to hang around until early next week, Carroll said. Still, the forecast could change between now and then.

"There's so much uncertainty, honestly," Carroll said Friday morning. “We like to use a term called 'unsettled' to describe a storm like this, and that’s probably the best descriptor we have."