At Least 20 Dead as Historic Floods Sweep West Virginia
At least 23 people, including an 8-year-old boy who was wading in a foot of water, died in massive floods in West Virginia from a storm system that has dumped a historic amount of rain in parts of the state, state officials said Friday.
As much as 8-10 inches of rain fell in six to eight hours in parts of West Virginia, the National Weather Service said. This amount of rain in such a short time is likely a “one-in-a-thousand-year event,” the weather service said.
It was the third-deadliest flood on record in West Virginia, according to the West Virginia state climatologist Kevin Law. Only the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972 (when 125 died after a dam break) and a November 1985 flood (when 38 died from a combination of Hurricane Juan’s remnants and another storm) killed more in the state, Law said.
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