In the greater St. Louis area, about 6 to 10 inches of rain fell between midnight and 6 a.m., according to the weather service. Floodwaters surrounded vehicles on St. Louis-area streets and reached apartments and other buildings, videos on social media showed. A rescue worker in St. Louis, kneeling on the roof of a 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 left for all of this,” Adams told CNN of the flooding that made the street outside her apartment a virtual river. In the Ellendale neighborhood of St. Louis, fire crews checked about 18 flooded homes and rescued six people and six dogs by boat, the city’s fire department said early Tuesday. Water came into Andrew Shaffer’s St. Louis home “like a waterfall,” he told CNN affiliate KMOV. “I brought all three of my dogs, three kids and my wife out,” Schafer told KMOV. Emergency calls in St. Louis County came in “for multiple people who were stuck” in floodwaters, the county’s emergency management office said. “We urge everyone to avoid travel!” the office posted on Twitter, adding that central parts of the county were most affected. Portions of the St. Louis-area MetroLink commuter rail system were flooded, and would-be riders should plan for delays of two hours or more, the operator said. MetroLink’s Forest Park-DeBaliviere outdoor station just north of the city zoo was underwater, images from resident Tony Nipert show. He noticed the flooding while walking his dogs, he told CNN. “Right now it’s a river,” he tweeted of the station Tuesday morning. “I’ve never seen this before in the 4 years I’ve lived here.” Flooding was also accumulating on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, including the East St. Louis, where sections of interstate highways or their ramps were temporarily closed, the weather service said.
Part of I-70 is covered in water and parts of other interstates are also closed
Vehicles were reported submerged or stuck on flooded roads in various parts of the St. Louis area, the weather service said shortly after 6:30 a.m. All four interstates heading into downtown St. Louis — I-70, I-64, I-55 and I-44 — had at least one closure due to flooding early Tuesday, KMOV reported. Motorists in particular were asked to avoid I-70 in the St. Louis area, the state highway patrol said. A section of I-70 was closed in both directions before sunrise in St. Peters, about 30 miles northwest of St. Louis. Jerome Smith was stuck on that stretch of I-70 for three hours as workers tried to clear the drains, he told CNN. The highway was covered in water, held back by barriers on either side, video he recorded from his vehicle shows. “You can see there’s cars up there floating … It’s just all trapped — there’s nowhere for the water to go,” Smith says in the video. Rainfall this heavy in the St. Louis area occurs only once every 500 years, on average, according to weather service data. But the climate crisis is pushing these extremes to become more frequent and increasing rainfall around the world. The atmosphere can hold more moisture as temperatures rise, making major records even more likely to be broken. More water vapor in the atmosphere means more moisture available to fall as rain, which leads to higher rainfall rates. Anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions have warmed the planet by just over 1 degree Celsius, on average, with more intense warming in land areas. Scientists are increasingly certain of the role the climate crisis is playing in extreme weather and have warned that these events will become more intense and more dangerous with every fraction of a degree of warming. CNN’s Judson Jones, Dave Hennen, Angela Fritz and Raja Razek contributed to this report.
