Heavy Rains Strike Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia

Rare downpours in February pounded a broad swath of the Lower Mississippi Valley on Saturday, from western portions of Kentucky and Tennessee and extending to southwestern Virginia, officials and residents reported on Saturday.

“This is unprecedented for mid-February, at least in the last 20 years,” said Phil Baker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Memphis, of the rain in Kentucky and Tennessee.

While there were no immediate reports of deaths or catastrophic property damage by early Saturday night, officials warned residents to be prepared for more heavy rain, and not to drive through floodwaters.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Saturday afternoon that a landslide would keep Highway 160 in Knott County closed for several hours. Mr. Beshear also said that the water in Elizabethtown, a city of 33,000 residents, was reaching record levels. Some homes in Perry County had been evacuated, he said.

Parts of two dozen state highways were partially or fully flooded, according to the Kentucky State Police. Some firefighters and emergency crews rescued people and pets from flooded buildings and stranded cars.

In Tennessee, officials said that some roads, mostly in the western part of the state, were flooding, including State Route 210 in Lauderdale County.

In Virginia, severe flooding hit Hurley, a short distance from the Kentucky and West Virginia state lines. The small community suffered devastating floods in 2002 that nearly wiped it out.

For the rest of the eastern United States, frost, ice or snow was coating most of the eastern United States on Saturday into Sunday. But the unusual springlike surge of warmer, wetter weather into Sunday morning could mean that parts of the region will also face flooding rains, severe storms, freezing rain and, in the far north, heavy snow.

The rainfall is the rarity of this mid-February storm.

The region most at risk of flooding — including Tennessee and Kentucky — is already sopping wet, with some rivers near or at flood stage after having seen weeks of recent rainfall.

This rare amount of moisture surging north is more intense than the rain that has already fallen. And some places, like Lexington, Ky., where three to five inches of rain is forecast, could break their February record for daily rainfall. (Over three inches of rain was measured there on Feb. 13, 1989.)

“Part of the problem is before this rain event even started this morning, the grounds have already been saturated from earlier rainfall,” said Mr. Baker, the forecaster. “There’s going to be river flooding that’s going to persist for days.”

As of Saturday, the heaviest rainfall was expected over northwest Tennessee and western Kentucky, Mr. Baker said, with four to six inches of rain expected. Up to eight inches of rain could fall in some isolated areas, he said.

With the ground already saturated, forecasters in places like Paducah, Ky., are especially concerned by some of the outlier rainfall amounts of up to seven inches.

“It won’t take much to produce flooding,” one forecaster there wrote, warning that the region “may have a significant flooding event on our hands.”

Forecasters in the mountainous areas in the eastern regions of the places most at risk for flooding warned that the ground had produced conditions ripe for landslides and debris flows on steep slopes around the area.

Forecasters in Charleston, W.Va., reminded residents who live on or at the base of hillsides to watch for signs of potential ground movement: trees leaning in unusual orientations, or water and mud seeping in where they are not expected.

The warmer, springlike storm is expected to move off the Atlantic seaboard by Sunday evening, and winter will return on Monday.

Temperatures will plunge to below average across the eastern United States. Snow is likely to return on Tuesday and Wednesday, coating the same areas that may potentially flood this weekend in Tennessee and Kentucky — all as a coastal storm possibly returns heavy snow back to northeast coastal cities.

Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.