Tuesday rain causes flooding in Pearl River County

[00:00:00]could not have come at a worse time for South Mississippi though. Just a few weeks ago, a series of storms caused rivers to flood and several roads and neighborhoods to flood, too. Today, not looking much better in some spots.

[00:00:11]Rachel Hanley was there a couple of weeks ago and joins us live from Picayune again now. Rachel, familiar sight out there. What are you seeing?

[00:00:21]>> Well, we are seeing some rain.

[00:00:23]Thankfully, not as heavy of rain as we thought might be happening this afternoon. It seems to have mostly spared this area. So, that's good news.

[00:00:30]This neighborhood in particular got the worst of the storms that we saw this morning in this area where off of MLK Boulevard, right next to Jackson Landing Road. You can see behind me the streets are not looking too bad. They're getting more passable. Earlier, it did not look like that. This morning, we started off in Hancock County. We went to a sandbag still filling station to talk to some people who live in the area. They said that already from the storms that we saw this morning in this area, a lot of areas under houses and lawns and even smaller streets were flooded already.

[00:01:05]And so, they were worried about this rain this afternoon causing more of it.

[00:01:10]And they told us that the further north we got, the worse the problem would get.

[00:01:14]And so, we got on the road. We came up to Picayune and that certainly ended up being the case. The further we got here, the more water we started seeing on the side of the road. We got a tip to check out this neighborhood and we got here and saw lots of people dealing with water inside their homes, unfortunately.

[00:01:29]We saw people waiting through knee-high water on the road with mops and other supplies. We saw cars flooded and people told us that they were nervous looking at the forecast for this afternoon because they were already trying to dry out their floors. And now they saw more rain coming.

[00:01:48]>> We went over to the other side of town.

[00:01:50]We've gotten sandbags to put around the house to try to stop it coming in. The city has been coming barricade the streets off to stop people from being able to come up and down the streets.

[00:02:00]>> My house is already flooded. I'm going to put sandbags, try to keep as much water out as I can, but other than that, I don't know what else to do. I guess all I can ask for is prayers.

[00:02:16]>> Now, thankfully, again, the rain that we were expecting to see this afternoon did not end up being as bad as we thought it could be. So, that's really good. But, as you mentioned, Devin, a couple weeks ago, this same area, South Mississippi, we're talking Hancock County, Harrison County, Pearl River County, already had a lot of flooding from rivers and creeks that were overtopping because of a lot of rain up north and also rain here. So, the ground here in South Mississippi, from that and from this morning's flooding event, is already very saturated. So, Chris was mentioning that the kind of bull's-eye of that tropical system that we're seeing could hit South Mississippi. We are certainly hoping that's not the case because this area cannot handle any more water right now.