There’s another wet forecast for much of Texas, with rain and thunderstorms expected to continue on and off through the weekend.
This includes in Central Texas, where as of Friday morning close to 20,000 Austin Energy customers remained without power after a Wednesday night storm.
Weather watchers are now calling what happened Wednesday evening a “microburst” — straight-line winds of up to 85 miles per hour with a path about 10 miles long and up to 2 1/2 miles wide, according to the National Weather Service.
Trees fell and panels blew off at the UT Austin baseball stadium. One person was killed in flash flooding, and several others were rescued.
Austin-Travis County EMS Division Chief Paul Mallon said crews responded to several flash flooding calls during and after the storm.
“We had folks that were hiding underneath a gas station [by the pumps], maybe to protect their car from hail, and then the awning of the pump fell over onto those vehicles. Luckily on that one incident, it didn’t produce any patients,” he said. “We also had several flooding events — we dealt with nine that evening, and unfortunately one fatality.”
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Mallon said the amount of rain that fell and the speed with which it fell both set Austin up for flash flood conditions.
“Stack that on top of already saturated ground, it really set us up for this big flooding event. It was mostly focused in the north central part of the city,” he said. “And the other thing that complicates it is that at the tail end of rush hour, lots of folks are still out on the road,.
“Generally speaking, there are central Texas areas in a drought, so folks just aren’t mentally prepared to see a bunch of water on the road, but we sit squarely in the middle of a flash flood alley, and so these things happen.”
Even with wet weather in the forecast, Mallon said he doesn’t expect the same level of heavy rainfall again over the weekend.
“For the next several days, it looks like we’re going to be doing all right. I know last night it was predicted to be not so much a flooding event, but a wind event, with 70-, 80-mile-an-hour gusts, but less than an inch of rain,” he said. “It’s probably not going to be much of a big rain event Saturday through Sunday – looks like the teens and 20s percent chances of rain.”
This is not the first time a major storm or flooding event has happened around Memorial Day in Austin.
“Memorial Day does have something to it. If you go back in the way back machine all the way to 1981, there was a Memorial Day flood that wreaked havoc on the city, lots of damage,” Mallon said. “Moving forward up to 2015 Memorial Day floods and then the ones here just recently on the 28. So yeah, it’s definitely something that’s producing a trend that we don’t like.”
