(Reuters) -Heavy rain flooded parts of Alabama near Birmingham late on Wednesday, killing at least one person, closing roads and prompting several water rescues after a flash-flood emergency was issued for several counties.
Flash flooding was blamed for the death of a child in Arab, about 65 miles (105 km) north of Birmingham, the Marshall County Coroner’s Office said early on Thursday.
The U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) said numerous people had been rescued from vehicles stuck in water and that homes and roads were flooded, with the rains forming and moving into areas already suffering from significant and life-threatening flooding.
The NWS issued a flash flood emergency late Wednesday for Shelby and Jefferson counties in Alabama, where weather stations recorded 5-10 inches (13-25 cm) of rain in a day.
“While heavy rainfall has ended at this time, runoff is resulting in continued significant flooding w/major impacts. Elsewhere, areas of rain continue into the night,” the NWS said in a tweet early Thursday.
Birmingham receives an average of about 3.34 inches of rain in October, according to CNN, which means some areas received around double the precipitation they normally receive in an entire month.
“We’ve had numerous water rescues, people trapped in cars and rescued by fire departments and police departments, and we’ve had damage reports of trees on houses and trees on roadways, and it’s really across the entire Birmingham metro area,” Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency Director Jim Coker told CNN.
(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru and Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Toby Chopra and Mark Heinrich)
