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WILKES-BARRE — A new storm will bring a new crest to the Susquehanna River over the weekend and possibly cause some minor flooding, according to the National Weather Service.
The river is expected to reach a level of 18.4 feet by 8 a.m. Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, but the crest is fluid pending the rain and snow forecast to fall in the nearly 10,000 square mile basin upstream Thursday and Friday.
“It’s likely that it will continue to rise,” Jim Brewster, a hydrologist with the NWS office in Binghamton, NY, said Wednesday. One early model has a 30 percent chance of some minor flooding, he said.
Minor flooding occurs at 22 feet in the lowland areas of Plainsville in Plains Township and the Plymouth Flats in Plymouth Township. The Wyoming Valley Levee System is designed to provide protection when the river rises up to 41 feet in Wilkes-Barre.
How high the river level will rise, how fast and when the crest will occur can’t be determined yet, Brewster said. “There’s a wide spread of uncertainty,” he said.
Snow still covers the ground near the river’s headwaters at Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, NY, he explained. Some of the precipitation from the storm will start off as snow in the upper basin and change to rain that will add to the runoff, he added.
The crest predicted for 18 feet Wednesday missed the mark by approximately four feet after rain passed through and temperatures that had contributed to melting the remaining snow pack from March 14 blizzard cooled. The NWS cancelled the Flood Watch it had issued for midweek.
The NWS forecast called for the river level to hold at 14 feet through Thursday afternoon and drop to a low of just under 13 feet Friday morning before beginning a rapid climb over the next 24 hours.