Francine aftermath: Heavy rain, but no lasting local damage
Published 12:54 pm Monday, September 16, 2024
- A motorist gets stuck in flood waters along Kiln-Waveland Cutoff Road in the Shoreline Park neighborhood in Hancock County, Miss., after Hurricane Francine on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024.
After watching summertime go by with hardly a hint of meaningful rainfall, Cullman County and much of north Alabama saw the skies open all at once, thanks to the persistently lingering remnants of Hurricane Francine.
After hitting the Gulf coast Sept. 11 as a Category 2 hurricane, Francine whirled northward into Mississippi as a tropical storm, while spinning a slow-moving stretch of heavy rainfall bands across its eastern edge into Alabama. The Cullman area in particular received a prodigious share of the storm’s heavy precipitation, with as much as 10 inches of rain falling on portions of Cullman County over the four-day span between Thursday, Sept. 12, and Sunday, Sept. 15.
Though all of Cullman County received several inches of sustained rainfall, the county’s southern and western areas saw the greatest amounts, according to local rainfall totals reported by the National Weather Service. The deluge elicited both areal and flash flood warnings for Cullman County from the weather service. But aside from a handful of momentary spot flooding incidents, the county sustained no lasting damage to structures or public roads, and recorded no loss of life.
“We have been blessed — it could have been a lot worse,” Cullman Emergency Management Agency director, Tim Sartin said Monday.
“We did have a bridge that got water on it for a period of time, but it cleared away and the water started flowing again,” Sartin said. “We had some creeks that also rose, too. But everything subsided, and we didn’t have anything close to the trouble that Lawrence County [which borders Cullman to the northwest] has had. One of their main rivers rose above the flood stage.”
Portions of Lawrence County, including homes near the town of Courtland, were threatened early Sunday by rising flood stage levels along the Big Nance Creek just south of the Tennessee River. NWS issued a river flood warning for the area that extended into Monday, as runoff from the Francine-related rain event continued to funnel into Big Nance Creek throughout Sunday evening.
