Louisiana may have just shattered its all-time rainfall record, with an estimated 29 inches falling on a single town in 24 hours. Meanwhile, 29 million people are baking under heat alerts, tornadoes are threatening a World Cup match in Kansas City, and over 3 million travelers are trying to get somewhere through all of it. Happy Juneteenth weekend, everyone.
Louisiana Got Absolutely Obliterated
Let's start with the number that should make your jaw drop: 29 inches of rain in 24 hours. That's what fell on Cottonport, Louisiana on Friday, according to NBC News. The existing state record was 22 inches. Louisiana didn't just break its record, it buried it under seven additional inches of water.
Preliminary measurements from nearby Plaucheville clocked 22 inches, and Simmesport, sitting near the Atchafalaya River, recorded 17 inches. These are preliminary figures, mind you, which means the official numbers could shift. But the direction they're shifting is not going to make anyone feel better.
The culprit is the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur, which is grinding through eastern Texas, Louisiana, southern Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia this weekend. Flood alerts remain active for roughly 20 million people across the central and southern United States, NBC News reports. Twenty million people. That is more than the entire population of New York State.
The Ground Can't Take Any More
Here's what makes this weekend especially dangerous. The National Weather Service isn't just worried about the rain that's falling right now. It's worried about the rain that already fell. The agency warned that "the very moist airmass in place and saturated soils from the last week mean that locally significant flash flooding is a possibility if a storm sits over one place for too long."
Translation: the ground is full. There is nowhere for the water to go. Any additional downpour, even one that would normally be manageable, could tip a soaked field or a swollen creek into something genuinely catastrophic.
Additional heavy rain is expected this weekend across parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, per NBC News. By Sunday morning, the National Weather Service says the storm system will push east through the Midwest, pulling flash flood threats with it as new storms develop along a slow-moving warm front. So if you were hoping the disaster would stay put, it won't.
Kansas City Has a World Cup Match to Play in a Tornado Watch
While the South is drowning, the Plains are spinning up something different. Much of Nebraska, Kansas and eastern Colorado faces thunderstorms Saturday with the potential for tornadoes, large hail and wind gusts up to 75 miles per hour. Flood watches cover Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois and Indiana.
This is not great news for anyone planning to attend Saturday evening's World Cup match between Ecuador and Curaçao in Kansas City. NBC News flags this game specifically as being under threat. It is genuinely unclear what the contingency plan looks like when a major international soccer tournament collides with a Midwestern severe weather event at full throttle. Presumably FIFA has a rain policy. Whether it has a tornado policy is a different question.
Kansas City is not alone in its sporting misery. Over in Houston, the Netherlands play Sweden Saturday evening under heat index values that could hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The National Weather Service is advising people to stay hydrated and limit strenuous outdoor activities in the afternoon, which is excellent advice for everyone except, say, professional athletes who are contractually obligated to run for 90 minutes.
108 Degrees Doesn't Even Cover the Humidity
That 108-degree heat index figure in southeastern Texas isn't the air temperature. It's what it feels like when you factor in the humidity. The actual thermometer reading is lower. The sensation on your body is not.
Heat advisories stretch from southeastern Texas through Louisiana, southern Alabama and down into South Florida, NBC News reports. Twenty-nine million Americans are under some form of heat alert this weekend. That number is almost poetic in its symmetry with the 29 inches of rain that just crushed Louisiana, two completely different catastrophes sharing the same number while happening at the same time in overlapping regions.
The National Weather Service specifically urged residents to wear lightweight, light-colored clothing and to avoid strenuous outdoor activities during the afternoon hours. For context, that advice is going out to people who are also dealing with flood alerts. Some of these communities are getting the full menu.
Three Million Travelers Would Like to Get Home Now
Into this absolute chaos walks the American travel system, which was already not known for its grace under pressure. The Transportation Security Administration projects that more than 3 million passengers will pass through TSA checkpoints on Sunday alone, NBC News reports, as holiday travelers try to squeeze back through airports at the end of the long Juneteenth weekend.
Severe weather and high travel volume are two things that do not interact well. Flight delays cascade. Connecting flights become theoretical concepts. Airports turn into holding pens. Anyone flying in or out of Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Kansas City or Chicago this weekend should go ahead and download something long to watch offline and set their expectations accordingly.
This is the part of the summer travel season where the optimistic projections from airlines made in January meet the actual atmosphere of planet Earth in June, and the atmosphere wins every time.
The Dingo Take
There is a version of this story where the headline is just a weather report and everyone moves on. But look at what's actually happening here. A state that has been battered by extreme weather events for years just potentially set an all-time rainfall record. The National Weather Service is warning that the ground itself is too saturated to absorb any more water. Tornado watches and a 108-degree heat index are happening in the same country on the same weekend, in some cases in the same states. Climate scientists have been predicting this kind of simultaneous, overlapping extreme weather clustering for years, and here we are.
None of this is normal. A 22-inch rainfall record in Louisiana stood until Friday, when a single storm dropped 29 inches in one town. Records aren't supposed to get shattered by seven inches. That's not a bad storm, that's a different category of storm than the one that set the old record. And yet the political will to treat any of this as the emergency it is remains roughly where it was when the last record fell.
The World Cup is in town, 29 million people are sweating through heat advisories, 20 million are under flood alerts, and 3 million are trying to get through an airport on Sunday. Somewhere in a Kansas City stadium, Ecuador and Curaçao might be playing soccer under a tornado watch. If you were writing a movie script and turned this in, someone would send it back and tell you it was too on the nose.
