Flash floods close streets, highways on Friday

Highway 169 at Medicine Lake
Several vehicles were caught in flash flooding on Highway 169 at Medicine Lake on Friday night.
MnDOT

Once again the week ended in with a flurry of severe weather, but the storms that pummeled much of the middle part of Minnesota yesterday didn't do nearly the damage as those that hit a week ago Thursday.

A line of severe storms swept across the state about dinner time on Friday night, flooding streets, tipping over trees and stopping traffic across wide swath of central Minnesota.

Some of the worst was in Minneapolis, where Interstate 35W was reportedly under three feet of water under the 42nd Street bridge. Flooding also closed the I-94 connections on the south end of Highway 280, as well as U.S. 169 at Medicine Lake Road, in Golden Valley where cars were floating on the highway at one point.

In the Uptown neighborhood in Minneapolis, water was hip deep at the intersection of 22nd Street and Lyndale Avenue, flooding The Wedge Co-Op. Norm Smythe was sitting in the parking lot, waiting for the rain to let up so he could go inside and shop.

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"All of the sudden the car would just kind of flush sideways and it didn't dawn on me that I was floating," he said.

Describing the scene later, Smythe was standing beside his car, on the other side of the lot. There were three inches of water on the car's floor under the drivers' side seat.

"So I pushed it back to this spot, and I had to wait for it to get low enough where I could open the door and the water rushed in when I opened it," he said.

Lyndale Avenue
Lyndale Avenue is Minneapolis is flooded after strong thunderstorms moved through the Twin Cities on June 25, 2010.
MPR Photo/Tim Nelson

Luckily, no injuries were reported in the wake of the storms, despite downed power lines, a handful of storm-related traffic accidents and hail reported as much as 3 inches in diameter.

More than 30,000 Xcel Energy customers were reported to be without power as night fell.

MPR meteorologist Craig Edwards said storms Friday morning left a weather boundary running from the Twin Cities to southwest Minnesota.

"By four o'clock we had severe thunderstorm warnings issued for the Metro area that resulted in 1 to 2 inches of rainfall, and hail on the order of 1 to two inches as well," Edwards said. "Wind gusts to 55 miles an hour. Then another storm developed upstream from the that in the Clear Lake-Annandale area. That thunderstorm pretty much moved down 94 pretty much across the Twin Cities again with another one to two inches of rain, so on the order of two to three inches of rain fell, particularly in the north metro."

South of the Twin Cities, radar showed as many as four tornadoes, around Lewisville, New Ulm, Waldorf and Redwood, although again, no injuries or severe damage were reported, unlike the deadly storms last week that killed three.

The weather though, followed the same track in some places. The small town of Alden, just west of Albert Lea, reported trees and power lines down. A tornado wiped out farms around town the week before.

Friday's storms came the same day that the state applied for a federal disaster declaration for seven counties affected by the previous tornadoes, funnel clouds that swept the state from Mentor to the Iowa state line on June 17th.

Weather forecasters say that there's a potential for a second day of severe weather in a row across the region today.