Flooding over Memorial Day weekend led to road closures in Western and Central South Dakota. Dan McKemy is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Rapid City. He says the city has gotten a little more than eight inches of rain since the beginning of the year, accumulating seven inches in May.
“We’ve caught up to the normal yearly value and more on top of that, but a lot of it’s just come within the past few weeks. And so that’s why we’ve just had all flooding because the rain has saturated the soil. Since the soil is so saturated, it just runs off into the creeks and rivers and streams and that’s when we get the flooding,” McKemy says.
McKemy says flooding is not uncommon when so much rain falls so in a short amount of time. More rain is in the forecast For Western South Dakota the rest of the week.