Experts Predict Heavy Flooding Weather Service Issues Alert For Midwest, Rocky Mountains

The floods of ‘97 are only going to worsen.

The National Weather Service issued an alert Tuesday warning that heavy snow in the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains and rain-saturated soil elsewhere are likely to lead to the most widespread flooding in a decade.

Lethal flash floods also are expected in many areas, according to a report by hydrologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The predicted floods follow on recent flooding in the Ohio River Valley that killed at least 20 people, many of them while driving the family car.

“The way we see it right now, there is more area of the country at risk for potential flooding today than there has been in the past decade,” said Elbert W. Friday Jr., the NOAA’s assistant administrator for weather services. He pointed to heavy rains in the West and the East and said that since February the country’s midsection has been saturated.

“And when the soil is saturated, any additional rain is more likely to run off than to be absorbed,” he said.

Friday predicted record-breaking floods on the Red River of the North in North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota and the James River in South Dakota.

“These could be the highest floods in those areas in the 150 years we have been keeping records,” Friday said.

The Red River of the North flows into Canada. But the James would send its floodwaters into the Missouri and then into the Mississippi, Friday said.

“We want to make sure this doesn’t comes as a surprise to anyone,” he said.

Frank Richards, chief of the National Weather Service’s Hydrologic Information Center in Silver Spring, Md., predicted widespread flooding in large sections of the eastern Dakotas, southern Minnesota and Wisconsin and northern Iowa.

“As a result of inflow from so many tributaries, minor to moderate flooding is a virtual certainty on the lower Missouri and on the upper Mississippi,” he said.

Looking to the West, Richards said there is considerable concern about spring flooding in the northern and central Rocky Mountains, He said the concern centers on Idaho, and parts of Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado where snowpack totals are reported as significantly above average.

He said record flooding levels are expected on the lower Milk River in northeast Montana.

And he said much of Washington and northern Oregon are in jeopardy of serious flooding because of “exceptional snowpacks.”