Only days after flood waters ripped across the region, damaging thousands of homes and claiming at least nine lives, the National Weather Service on Friday issued a flash flood watch for much of northwest and west central Georgia, including Carroll County, until early morning Sunday. In addition, the NWS issued a river flood warning for Whitesburg near the Chattahoochee River.

According to a flash flood watch issued by the NWS at 3:42 a.m. Friday, a strong upper-atmosphere system and cold front was expected to move through the state late Friday from the Tennessee Valley, bringing with it between 1 to 2 inches of rainfall and the potential for renewed flooding over the weekend in parts of the county that have already been deluged by historic rainfall.

A flash flood watch is issued when conditions are favorable for flash flooding in flood-prone areas where grounds are already saturated from recent rains, as would be the case for all Carroll County communities within flood plains or adjacent to streams, creeks or rivers.

“With abundant moisture in place and soils still saturated from last weekend’s widespread significant flooding ... any rain that develops will lead to additional flooding concerns,” the alert reads. “Soils remain saturated from the widespread heavy rain across the region last weekend. Thus any rain that develops will likely all run off into creeks and streams ... leading to rapid rises.”

If flooding occurs over the weekend, it isn’t expected to be as far-reaching or destructive as that seen earlier in the week, but residents need to be on alert.

“We’re just trying to prepare people that there could be some heavy downpours again, and if it falls in the wrong areas it could get bad,” said Kent Frantz, a service hydrologist with the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City. “It’s a legitimate threat from the point of view that it’s a different system from what we had going on in there earlier. Now there’s abundant tropical moisture in place, and our soils are very saturated, and in the areas that have seen some tremendous flooding there’s tremendous runoff potential.”

Frantz said the NWS runs a twice-daily weather simulation, and because a number of simulations that ran on Thursday and Friday pointed toward additional rainfall, the service decided it was time to issue a watch in the hopes that preparedness might lessen the impact of any new flood waters.

Though expectations of 1 to 2 inches don’t seem alarming in themselves, Frantz said, recent weather patterns have brought storms to the county that either move slowly or dump huge amounts of rain on an area over a short period of time. Both scenarios are recipes for the kind of flooding that has strained emergency responders since Monday.

“Ordinarily, you’d think that’s not that big of a deal if it’s spread out over time and everything can have a chance to handle it and the runoff can just go through the system, but what’s changed in the last couple of weeks is that we’re getting these intense rainfall amounts that set up over one area or become almost stationary, and that’s when it gets bad,” Frantz said.

The chance of rain for Carroll County was 40 percent Friday night, and 80 percent today.

Even with rain expected, Carroll County Fire Chief Tracy Smith said he doesn’t anticipate the kind of flooding seen earlier this week.