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CAPE FEAR MEMORIAL BRIDGE CLOSURE: UPDATES, RESOURCES, AND CONTEXT

Hurricane Matthew Breaks Local Record

http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=ilm&gage=wlon7
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National Weather Service
Hydrograph of the Cape Fear River at Wilmington

Hurricane Matthew has set a new local record.  According to a tide gauge near downtown Wilmington, the water level of the Cape Fear River climbed to 8.21 feet today.  This beats Hurricane Hazel's record of 8.15 feet, set back in 1954. 

Hurricane Hazel was a Category 4 storm that lashed the coasts of North Carolina over sixty years ago.  But today, a combination of the storm surge and rainfall draining into the river basin led to the highest water level ever recorded by the National Weather Service’s downtown water gauge. 

But Hurricane Matthew does not hold a candle to Hazel.  That's according to Steven Pfaff, the Warning Coordinator Meteorologist for the National Weather Service.  After all, Matthew is brushing by us as a Category 1 storm.

“But it just goes to show you, you can have varying impacts regardless of what the Saffir-Simpson scale is.  The Saffir-Simpson scale purely is just a defining parameter for the wind speed aspect of the storm—not the size of the storm, not necessarily the surge associated with it, the rainfall that it brings, or the number of tornadoes that it brings, and I think that’s what gets people into trouble.  We focus so much on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and we fail to look at the individual impacts and what they mean to where we live.”

Here in the Cape Fear region, our impacts include flooding, downed trees, power outages, and dangerous roadways.  And they’ll be a little more difficult to gauge than something as clear cut as water level.