At least 1 killed as record rainfall causes widespread flash flooding in St. Louis area

(CNN) — Torrential and record-breaking rainfall caused widespread flash flooding in the St. Louis area Tuesday morning, killing at least one person, forcing rescues of people trapped in vehicles and homes, and spurring road closures including on part of Interstate 70, officials said.

In St. Louis itself, more than 8 inches of rain had fallen from midnight to 7 a.m. CT — already surpassing the city’s all-time one-day record of 6.85 inches set on August 20, 1915, the National Weather Service said.

In the wider St. Louis area, about 6 to 10 inches of rain fell from midnight to 6 a.m., according to the weather service. More rain was forecast, though it was expected to taper off late in the morning and end by mid-afternoon, the weather service’s office in St. Louis wrote.

One person was found dead in a vehicle that had become stuck in “approximately eight and a half” feet of water in western St. Louis, city Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson said. Authorities checked the vehicle after a caller reported that someone may be inside, and found the body when waters receded, the chief said.

Floodwater surrounded vehicles on other St. Louis-area streets and crept up to apartments and other buildings, videos on social media showed.

A rescuer in St. Louis, kneeling on the top of the roof of one flooded car, handed a child to other rescuers in a boat, video recorded by Victorria Adams from an apartment balcony showed. “My neighbors woke me up to tell me what was going on. Then I walked out to all of this,” Adams told CNN of the floodwaters that made the street outside her apartment a virtual river.

In St. Louis’ Ellendale neighborhood, fire personnel checked about 18 flooded homes, and rescued six people and six dogs by boat, the city fire department said early Tuesday.

Water entered Andrew Schafer’s St. Louis home “like a waterfall,” he told CNN affiliate KMOV.

“I carried all three of my dogs, three kids, and wife out,” Schafer told KMOV.

Emergency calls in St. Louis County were coming in “for multiple people stuck” in floodwaters, the county emergency management office said.

“We urge everybody to avoid travel!” the office posted to Twitter, adding central portions of the county were affected most.

Parts of the St. Louis area’s MetroLink commuter rail system were flooded, and would-be riders should plan for delays of two hours or more, the provider said.

MetroLink’s outdoor Forest Park-DeBaliviere station just north of the city’s zoo was underwater, images from resident Tony Nipert show. He noticed the flooding while walking his dogs, he told CNN.

“It’s currently a river,” he wrote on Twitter about the station Tuesday morning. “I have never seen this in the 4 years I’ve lived here.”

More than 6,000 power outages were reported around 1:50 p.m. in St. Louis County, and more than 1,100 in neighboring St. Charles County, according to PowerOutage.us.

In the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, a fire department crew helped Leisha Waters and her children from their apartment building Tuesday after floodwaters surrounded it, she told CNN.

“I was in the house with the window open to get light because the power went out, and I heard the fireman on a boat yelling,” Waters said. “So me and my kids packed a bag and left.”

Power was out for more than 10,000 homes and businesses in St. Charles and St. Louis counties, most of them in the

Floodwaters also were collecting on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, including the East St. Louis area, where parts of interstate highways or their ramps were temporarily closed, the weather service said.

Stretch of I-70 covered by water and parts of other interstates also closed

Vehicles were reported submerged or otherwise stranded on flooded streets in various parts of the St. Louis area, the weather service said shortly after 6:30 a.m.

All four interstate highways heading to downtown St. Louis — I-70, I-64, I-55, and I-44 — had at least one closure because of flooding early Tuesday, KMOV reported. Motorists especially were urged to avoid I-70 in the St. Louis area, the state highway patrol said.

A stretch of I-70 was closed in both directions before sunrise in St. Peters, roughly a 30-mile drive northwest of St. Louis.

Jerome Smith found himself stuck on that part of I-70 for three hours as workers tried to clear drains, he told CNN. The highway was covered by water, which was held in by barriers on either side, video he recorded from his vehicle shows.

“You can see there’s cars up there floating around. … It’s just all boxed in — there’s nowhere for the water to go,” Smith says in the video.

Rainfall this intense in the St. Louis area only occurs once every 500 years, on average, according to data from the weather service.

But the climate crisis is pushing these extremes to become more frequent, and is supercharging rainfall around the world. The atmosphere can hold more moisture as temperatures climb, making it even more likely that significant records will be broken. More water vapor in the atmosphere means more moisture available to fall as rain, which leads to higher rainfall rates.

Human-caused fossil fuel emissions have warmed the planet a little more than 1 degree Celsius, on average, with more intense warming over land areas. Scientists are increasingly confident in the role that the climate crisis plays in extreme weather, and have warned that these events will become more intense and more dangerous with every fraction of a degree of warming.

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