Friday night, rain inundated eastern North Carolina and no place was that more felt than in Washington, where tornado warnings cancelled the first night of the Washington Summer Festival and flooding throughout the city stranded some motorists.

According to Beaufort County Emergency Management Coordinator John Pack, five to six inches of rain fell, starting with a few heavy showers in the afternoon that continued until after midnight with periods of torrential rain — enough to overwhelm drainage systems throughout the city.

Around 8 p.m., Washington police began blocking off intersections from Third Street to 15^th Street in an attempt to keep motorists from driving into deep water. In most places, they were successful in rerouting people from driving into unknown depths, but in others, motorists ignored the warnings. Stalled and abandoned vehicles clogged the city streets.

According to Lt. William Chrismon, spokesman for Washington Police Department, approximately 11 vehicles stalled and were abandoned on the city streets.

“There are also a very large number of cars parked on side streets that were probably damaged or totaled by the storm water,” Chrismon said.

During the storm Washington Police deployed more than three times the normal working force — they worked for over six hours deploying cones, moving cones when the standing water changed, directing traffic, blocking roadways and responding to reports of stranded motorists, in addition to trying to find routes across the city and navigate rescue calls.

“One of the largest problems were people driving, either trying to get home or just out observing, and driving through areas that had been blocked or coned off,” Chrismon said. “People driving through standing water was creating real life emergencies or problems for residents in low-lying homes and causing damage to them which we were trying to address, but people wouldn’t obey traffic control devices. They were put in place for safety and people just ignored them.”

Several homeowners in the flooded areas called police to complain about drivers of four-wheel drive vehicles leaving the road and cutting through yards to avoid deep water.

Road were also flooded in the Smallwood neighborhood, even in areas where the city installed a new drainage system just two years ago.

“They had a couple of cars that tried to go through the water and got stalled, then there was a backup of about 20 cars, people honking their horns, trying to get through. City police had to go up and straighten it out,” Pack said.

It was after 1 a.m. before the city was largely navigable, Chrismon said.

Pack said he and other officials believe the area has not seen this amount of flooding since Hurricane Irene, though it didn’t approach the levels of the 2011 storm that devastated much of Beaufort County.

In addition to stranded motorists, there were several reports of accidents cause by hydroplaning on roads prone to flooding, including one vehicle that ended up completely immersed in a ditch off Corsica Road.

“When it’s dark they drive right into it. They don’t see it,” Pack said.

The torrential rain started around the time the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the area at 7 p.m., a warning that was later extended until 8 p.m. Though there were two reports of tornado touchdowns — one outside Pinetown and the other between Bunyan and Bath — Pack and other emergency officials investigated both Friday night and again on Saturday morning and found no evidence of touchdowns. County residents have become much more tornado-aware since two tornadoes wrought widespread damage throughout the county — the first one on April 6 in the Belhaven/Pantego area; the second, an EF3 tornado that cut a devastating northeasterly path from Chocowinity to Terra Ceia on April 25.

Pack said there was good news from the latest weather event: while plenty of homes were surrounded by water, there were no reports of homes actually flooding. He said that, once again, Beaufort County survived another severe weather event, but he warned residents to take extreme caution when the next rolls through.

“You know, that phrase, ‘Turn around, don’t drown,’ makes a lot of sense,” Pack said.

“People were really lucky last night. To go through the events we’ve been going through with these severe storms, we’ve been lucky we haven’t had any loss of life.”

“When something as odd as this storm was happens, we just ask for people to observe traffic control devices and stay out of water when they can’t see what is below it,” Chrismon said. “People need to take shelter where they are or find a safe place to wait it out until it is safe to travel.“