Skip to main content
Global Edition
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Sally brings 'historic and catastrophic' flooding

Duration: 01:56s 0 shares 1 views

Sally brings 'historic and catastrophic' flooding
Sally brings 'historic and catastrophic' flooding

[NFA] Sally, which made landfall early Wednesday as a Category 2 storm, brought what the U.S. National Hurricane Center called "historic and catastrophic" flooding to the Alabama-Florida coast.

This report produced by Jillian Kitchener.

Sally uprooted trees, flooded streets and left hundreds of thousands of people without power on the Alabama-Florida coast on Wednesday.

Sally made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane - bringing winds of up to 105 miles per hour - but was downgraded in the afternoon to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 70 miles per hour.

The National Hurricane Center said the storm brought "historic and catastrophic" flooding, as some parts of the Gulf Coast were inundated with more than 18 inches of rain over a 24-hour period.

And the rain was not expected to stop any time soon.

Gulf Shore, Alabama resident Logan Estill said he rode out the storm.

“We started hearing all of our windows start to pop.

Part of the roof started coming off and the siding was ripping.

We just rode it out about 5am, 6am.

We fell asleep and woke up at 9am and started walking out.” Walking out to flooded streets, toppled signs and a damaged gas station.

A section of the pier at Gulf Shores State Park was ripped in half.

Winds brought down massive trees in downtown Mobile, and torrential rains pummeled a swath of the south coast from Louisiana to Florida.

The coastal resort community of Pensacola, Florida, suffered up to five feet of flooding, and travel was cut by damaged roads and bridges.

Likewise, streets in Florida’s Panama City were drowned out.

Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said residents were not yet in the clear: "The amount of rain that's being dumped to our north is going to impact places in the Northwest Florida.

So you're going to have these rivers that are going to crest.

Maybe they'll happen tomorrow, maybe Friday, you know, maybe even see some of them will happen this weekend." The storm was moving at a slow 5 mph pace toward the Alabama-Florida border but was predicted to pick up speed.

You might like

Related news coverage

Advertisement