In Brief

Hurricane Florence Drowned a Riverfront 30 Miles from the North Carolina Coast (Video)

The town of Washington, North Carolina is about 30 miles up the Pamlico River from the coast.
The town of Washington, North Carolina is about 30 miles up the Pamlico River from the coast.
(Image credit: Google Maps)

In a hurricane, as Live Science has reported, the most significant threat is flooding, not the high winds.

And Hurricane Florence, though far from the fastest-windspeed storm in recent memory, remains a significant threat precisely due to the large surge and huge rainfall it's dumping on affected areas. Already, video has come out from along the Carolina coastline showing that the ocean has effectively moved onto the land, swamping homes in the affected area. And it's travelling farther and creating deeper floods thanks to sea-level rise from climate change, which research indicates has added as much as 6 inches to Florence's surge.

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Rafi Letzter
Staff Writer
Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.