Chief Meteorologist: Flood this big is rare
While moving around the country to chronicle this week’s disaster, News 5 reporters heard dozens of opinions which sought to explain the severity of the flooding. Theories ranged all the way from the political–that is blaming the government–to the diabolical–which meant blaming the Chalillo dam, even though the project has yet to get underway. This afternoon News 5’s Stewart Krohn sought the advice of the one man who should know: Chief Meteorologist, Carlos Fuller.
Stewart Krohn
“Carlos, it’s late afternoon on Friday, what is the status of the weather right now and what can we expect over the weekend in terms of possible flooding?”
Carlos Fuller, Chief Meteorologist
“Thankfully most of the rain has now ended. Last night we still had a band of showers that moved from the south to the north, starting in Toledo, moved up the Maya mountains and produced heavy rainfall, something like two to three inches over the Maya mountains. And that produced further flooding in the river in the Toledo District, the Stann Creek District and the Cayo District. So we still have to contend with those waters. Fortunately, most of that rain has now ended and we should be going for gradual improvement as we go into the weekend.”
Stewart Krohn
“That’s the precipitation picture, yet we still have all the rain that came over the last two and three days still coming down some of the main rivers, particularly the Sibun and the Macal and Belize River. What can we expect in terms of flooding on those two rivers?”
Carlos Fuller
“Two are two areas of major concern for us right now. The Macal River has started to recede up at Mollejon, they have fallen by about three feet since early this morning. But at San Ignacio it continues to rise and during the past six hours it rose over five and a half feet. So they will continue to rise. At Roaring Creek the Belize River is finally rising there, and I do believe that is going to back up and we could see the Roaring Creek Bridge get inundated either tonight or tomorrow morning. So all these waters still have to come down. Fortunately, after Roaring Creek, the land gets so flat that this water then spreads out over a larger area, so the villages in the eastern part of the Belize River don’t get as heavily flooded as those further west. The Sibun River is also starting to recede at Jaguar Paw and the water is going down, but it’s still a major flood there, and that water is now affecting Freetown Sibun and those villages further downstream on the Sibun River. So those two rivers are still a concern for us.”
Stewart Krohn
“As far as people who live along the Sibun, or along the lower portions of the Macal before it combines to form the Belize River, what is your advice to those people?”
Carlos Fuller
“I think they still need to monitor those rivers very carefully and ensure that their evacuation routes would not go underwater before where they actually are. That is always a major concern for us, that where the person is may be high enough, but when they see the water rising they panic and the road that would be their evacuation route is already submerged. So they need to know their terrain very well.”
Stewart Krohn
“Lets look at this particular weather event that took place over the middle of this week. You may have seen on yesterday’s newscast, residents at St. Matthew’s for example, houses two thirds covered with water they say it happened (snaps finger) like that. They didn’t have time to evacuate, even a lot of their precious possession were left in there. We’ve never seen this kind of thing before, what are your theories as to why this happened?”
Carlos Fuller
“There were two events that really produces heavy rainfall. We had two tropical waves cross the country within three days. Normally, tropical waves are about five days apart. And in additional, there was an anti-cyclone, and area of high pressure which acts like an exhaust mechanism above us. So while the air was flowing in producing rain below, it was being expelled, allowing more to enter. And it was peculiar that the cell that formed over Belmopan stayed there for almost two days. Virtually as one cell dies out another, one redeveloped right over it and as you know, that area got something like twenty-two inches of rain within one day. That is two times the normal June rainfall in one day. So two months of rain in one day, no drainage system can possibly handle that.”
Stewart Krohn
“So are we looking at this as kind of a single cataclysmic event that we will maybe not see again for fifty or a hundred years?”
Carlos Fuller
“This is certainly a once in a lifetime rain event. We have never anything like that before, it shattered every record that we had in the books. But to say that we will never see it again, that’s impossible to say. Certainly we thought we had seen the thirty-five inches in Keith, that was major flooding. Now we get twenty-two inches in one day, again another major event.”
Stewart Krohn
“What I’m getting at Carlos, is this the kind of event that our planners need to take in account. For example, do we need to build bigger, higher bridges on the Western Highway, do we need to put in a new backdoor route to Belmopan? Or are we wasting our money if we try to prepare for this kind of event?”
Carlos Fuller
“No certainly, that is where we need to put in the hydrological studies. For two long we have been building these kinds of infrastructure without doing the proper research, putting in the proper monitoring networks to see how often does the river come to a certain level, and should we start to plan for it. We did that in the south and we are finally building bridges that will make Deep River and Golden Stream all year weather roads. We need to start to look at the same thing for our bridges along the Western Highway also.”
Stewart Krohn
“It’s still June, the traditional worst of our weather season is well ahead of us, what does the events of this week portend for the rest of the hurricane season?”
Carlos Fuller
“It’s really impossible to say that this rain is gonna cause anything in the future. But we are certainly believing that we’re gonna have another active year. The Caribbean has entered a long period of high hurricane activity. We know this from the records going back a hundred years that we go into a ten, fifteen, twenty year cycle of low activity then high activity. Since 1995 we have entered that high active period, so I am pretty certain that for the next ten, fifteen years we’re going to see a lot of activity in our area.”
New equipment received after hurricane Mitch makes it much easier for the weather bureau to track hurricanes as well as localised weather events like that which hit Belize this week.
