A flash flood is a rapid flooding of geomorphic low-lying areas: washes, rivers, dry lakes and basins. It may be caused by heavy rain associated with a storm, hurricane, tropical storm, or meltwater from ice or snow flowing over ice sheets or snowfields. Flash floods may occur after the collapse of a natural ice or debris dam, or a human structure such as a man-made dam, as occurred before the Johnstown Flood of 1889. Flash floods are distinguished from a regular flood by a timescale of less than six hours. The temporary availability of water is often utilized by foliage with rapid germination and short growth cycle, and by specially adapted animal life.
Read more about Flash Flood: Causes, Hazards, Significant Flash Floods
Famous quotes containing the words flash and/or flood:
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Twilight and evening bell.
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)