What started as a drizzle in Greenwood Wednesday night turned into a highly localized downpour that dumped as much as 5 inches of rain on the city in about an hour.
The storm, which struck around 7 p.m., caused flash flooding throughout Greenwood but dropped nothing more than a light drizzle on the surrounding areas.
David Cox, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, said that meteorologists had predicted a 30 percent chance of rain last night but that a “complex of storms” moving out of Arkansas parked over Greenwood.
“It looks pretty isolated,” Cox said. “There’s not as much rainfall even in surrounding areas. What you got there in downtown was the heaviest; everywhere else was fairly light.”
In Greenwood, heavy precipitation flooded many streets, spilling over the sidewalks downtown and turning the Main Street underpass into a pond.
At Greenwood-Leflore Airport 10 miles away in Carroll County, the rain gauge showed just 0.2 inches of rain.
Jerry Smith, the Leflore County road manager, said his crews were out for most of the night battling flooding in the Buckeye subdivision. Other parts of the county reported few problems, Smith said.
“Over in the Buckeye area, we probably got 3½ inches of rain in less than an hour,” Smith said. “There were several houses over there that got water into them.”
Several motorists driving along Main Street in Greenwood ended with their vehicles submerged at the underpass, which was filled with well over 8 feet of water.
The Leflore County Sheriff’s Department and the Greenwood Fire Department helped pull several vehicles from the water after the drivers became stuck.
Greenwood Fire Chief Marcus Banks said no one was hurt, but he was a bit puzzled by how vehicles keep winding up in the flooded-out underpass during storms.
“It’s kind of strange how people keep going in the water like that,” Banks said. “From what I’m told, there were several vehicles that were submerged or partially submerged in the water.”
Larry Griggs, vice president for operations at Greenwood Utilities, said Greenwood-area customers experienced few disruptions of service Wednesday night. Several fuses were knocked out by fallen tree limbs, and some customers experienced “blinks” — very short outages — but otherwise the power remained on throughout the area, Griggs said.
Although the localized storm brought plenty of rain, there was relatively little wind — something Griggs said led to a fairly quiet night for the public utility’s crews.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of wind, just some heavy rain,” Griggs said. “Had there been a lot of wind, there would’ve been more work for us to do.”
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
