Caught off guard: How South Florida’s rare storm compares to others, and where it sits in history

When the deluge came, South Floridians were caught off guard: We’d sent our kids to school, gone to work, planned on commuting home for dinner. It was, after all, only April. If we’re going to be submerged by 26 inches of rain in a matter of hours, it’s supposed to happen during a hurricane in summer, not on a random Wednesday.

Normally we get five days of warnings about a tropical depression growing into a tropical storm and then a hurricane. We prepare (at least a little).

On Wednesday, parts of South Florida did none of that, and we paid the price: The historic downpours, which also spun off two tornadoes, stranded commuters, displaced many residents and caused millions of dollars’ worth in damage. Rescue workers pulled people to safety from the flood waters.

“We had zero notice. If you know a hurricane is coming, you can evacuate everyone. But this happened in four hours and there isn’t anything you can do,” said Gary Cioffi, managing sponsor of the Yacht Haven Park and Marina in Fort Lauderdale, whose property was covered in 3 feet of water in some parts. “It was like someone opened a faucet over our resort and left it on for four hours.”

Just days later, meteorologists are looking into exactly what happened. The forces at play were not those of a tropical storm, but they delivered more rain than most hurricanes, along with intense winds. “There isn’t a good buzzword for this,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Nick Carr of the anomalous weather event, and he said they don’t yet know why it focused largely over the Fort Lauderdale area.

Were there warning signs? Have there been other storms like this? And is this the new normal? Here’s a look at where this storm fits in history, and how it caught South Floridians by surprise.

Record-breaking rain

If the numbers hold up, Wednesday’s storm will go down in the history books. The previous record for 24-hour rainfall for Fort Lauderdale was 14.59 inches, set in 1979.

In December 2009, another non-Hurricane storm flooded parts of Broward. Fifteen inches of rain fell in 24 hours and soaked areas of Dania Beach, Hallandale Beach and Pembroke Pines. Officials from the South Florida Water Management District called it a “1-in-100-year” storm.

Other areas of Broward and Palm Beach counties have seen more than 20 inches — Hurricane Eta in 2020 thrashed Pembroke Pines with 20.74 inches of rain. Beyond our region, last year’s Hurricane Ian’s largest rainfall was 21.09 inches at Spruce Creek, near Daytona Beach.

But Wednesday’s storm could top them all.

Its 25.91 inches of rain in 24 hours will be the new state record, if it’s confirmed. The current Florida record of 23.28 inches occurred in Key West on Nov. 11-12, 1980, as Hurricane Jeanne, which never made landfall in Florida, swept into the Gulf. The storm dumped 13.58 inches in six hours.

Wednesday’s storm has that beat — preliminary numbers from the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport measuring station show this storm dumped an astounding 20.07 inches in six hours, between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.

These records come with an asterisk. Back on Sept. 5, 1950, officials estimated that 38.70 inches fell at Yankeetown, near Cedar Key during Hurricane Easy. Though the measurement is considered “reasonably accurate” by the weather service, it’s not an official record because “an estimate cannot be considered an official observation from a reliable precipitation gauge.”

The all-time 24-hour record in the U.S. is 49.69 inches in Kauai, Hawaii, on April 14-15, 2018.

There were warnings, but no one saw 2 feet coming

Though it may seem like this storm came out of nowhere, the National Weather Service in Miami started posting flood warnings on their Twitter feed on Sunday, April 9, based on the rainy Easter.

“Afternoon showers and thunderstorms could result in localized flooding in vulnerable urban areas across the east coast metro areas,” the tweet said.

There were three days of intermittent rain before Wednesday, and the weather service’s warnings became more urgent as days passed.

By Monday evening there were flash-flood warnings for Miami-Dade. Pembroke Pines saw 4 inches. Fort Lauderdale, 3 inches. Little did we know what was coming.

By Tuesday night, their radar showed a monster tempest off the coast, where it roiled in one place. Warnings said that it would move ashore Wednesday. The Broward flood watch ended with the ominous, “Use caution on the roads!”

On Wednesday, there were flash-flood warnings advising people to get to higher ground in Miami-Dade, up to Hollywood.

The storm was so surprising in its energy that those warnings didn’t include the city of Fort Lauderdale until 3:38 p.m. And flood warnings without a hurricane might seem trivial.

The surprise of the storm sent Susan Phipps on a misadventure she won’t forget. Wednesday was just another work day until she tried to leave her office near the Safe Harbor Lauderdale Marine Center at 4:30 p.m.

With streets already flooded, Phipps, 62, soon stalled her SUV. She called a tow truck, and waited for three hours, but it never came. “I just kept thinking ... ‘Don’t abandon your car.’” Eventually she had to.

As the water neared her windows she grabbed her belongings and jumped out of the back of her SUV, landing into nearly waist-deep water.

She wandered around River Oaks and at about 8:30, banged on the door of a house, and saw a man walking in calf-high water in his underwear. When he opened the door, water rushed in, so he closed it.

Standing barefoot in the thunder, lighting and rain, she spotted a rescue truck and waved it down. Eventually the truck dropped her and others off at Lester’s Diner at 250 W. State Road 84.

“It was packed. It was like a town hall meeting going on there,” she said. “People clustered around the window, watching what was going on, talking to people about what happened to their homes, their cars, the situation at hand.”

As she sipped hot tea at the counter, she couldn’t believe a storm like this could pop up without warning.

It was another three hours before her “hero” came — an elderly Uber driver who managed to get her home by 1 a.m.

Seeing a rise in ‘very high-end rain events’

The National Weather Service classifies an event like this as a 1-in-500-year event caused by an unusual combination of forces — think of it as a traffic jam and a water pipe.

“It came so quickly,” said Jennifer Belt, executive director of the Stranahan House, a pioneer home from the early 1900s that is now a museum just feet from the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale. “I don’t think anybody expected the water to come as fast as it did.”

Carr explained that a high-pressure system in the Midwest would not move, and blocked a big low-pressure system in the Gulf. “That low was just stuck,” Carr said.

Additionally, another low-pressure system at lower altitudes ended up in the perfect spot, rotating counterclockwise, to suck massive amounts of warm wet air up from the tropics into the system and aim it at South Florida. That pipeline of tropical wetness plummeted down onto Broward County on Wednesday.

Climate change has been ramping up weather events around the globe, according to a 2023 report by the American Meteorological Society. Carr cautions against jumping to conclusions about a single storm, though. “Individual events you can’t attribute to climate change, although we have seen an increase in the past several years of these very high-end rain events near the top echelon of historical records,” he said.

“Whether the particular event had anything to do with climate change, we can’t say for sure, but we can say with confidence that it does seem like heavy rains across a lot of the country, and even the globe, have been increasing in frequency over the past few years. And there’s some physical basis to believe that it’s correlated with climate change.”

Looking ahead to hurricane season

Was this a primer for a tough hurricane season, which starts June 1? Scientists say no.

Colorado State University researchers released the first, early predictions for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season earlier this week. They indicate “slightly below-average activity,” with 13 named storms and eight becoming hurricanes.

There’s some ambiguity to the report, mainly because scientists can’t quite pin down yet how strong an El Niño weather pattern will occur in the Pacific Ocean.

El Niños warm the eastern half of the Pacific and can decrease cyclone activity in the Atlantic via vertical wind shear.

Even though there may be an El Niño, water temperatures in the eastern tropical and subtropical Atlantic — where tropical storms that affect Florida get their start — are significantly warmer than usual, which could counter the El Niño effect.

Staff writer Lisa J. Huriash contributed to this news article.