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Florence Could Bring Heavy Rain, Flooding to Shoreline Next Week

Florence made landfall as a hurricane hundreds of miles away, but emergency operations personnel in Connecticut are still keeping an eye on the storm’s path.

Next week, the remnants could bring some flooding to communities along the shoreline.

Barbara Charette showed NBC Connecticut how high the water rose when Irene and Sandy hit the shoreline. Her Westbrook home of 22 years is across from the town beach.

“An extra high tide and a full moon it floods out,” Charette said, “it’s just such a low lying area”

The threat of flooding during major storms comes with the territory of living by Long Island Sound, Charette said.

“It does unfortunately,” she said. “I mean you can be inland and not worry about it, but there’s still hurricanes inland, they just don’t get the water like we do.”

Inside the Westbrook Emergency Operations Center, Director Don Izzo tracks the path of tropical storms forming in the Atlantic.

“Myself and many of my colleagues across Connecticut we’re still watching (Florence),” Izzo said. “We watched it when it first formed and we will continue to watch it because the remnants is always a concern for us.”

While too early to tell for sure, Izzo said minor flooding from what’s left of Florence is a real possibility in neighborhoods by the beach next week.

“We’re looking for potential rains, which will be coupled with the high tides,” he said. “We’ll have to watch, we’ll have to watch the phases of the moon.”

During Irene and Sandy, Charette and her husband followed the evacuation orders.

“If it’s going to be that bad, we definitely would leave,” she said. “Your land is important, but your life is a lot more important, you can’t replace it.”

This month, the Town of Westbrook is raising awareness about disaster preparedness and advising families to put together emergency kits.

While next week’s potential flooding shouldn’t rise to the level of mandatory evacuations, the hurricane season is far from over.

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