For you folks who are living through your first hurricane season, you will hear emergency workers and TV folks talking about both flooding and storm surge. Surge can cause flooding, but these terms are really referring to different issues.
Storm surge is wave action that comes from the storm winds pushing water inland. The severity of surge is often associated with tides. The best case is when the surge happens at low tide. The worst case is when we get a surge at high tide.
You can watch the tide monitoring here. The chart looks like this (captured Thursday 9am)
Flooding is the routine problem we experience when we get a lot of rain in a short time, usually in a tropical storm or hurricane. In Pinellas County, you most often see flood pictures from a couple of places: Shore Acres, which is on the other side of the city of St Pete from us and Gulfport, which often experiences flooding downtown.
Storm surge is not the same thing as your evacuation level, even though the two mapping tools can look similar. While hurricane evacuation zones are based on storm surge, they also consider other public safety factors such as being cut off from first responder support. For example, properties on barrier islands that are connected to the mainland by a bridge are all considered to be in a Level A evacuation due to the risk to the bridge and to citizens being isolated.
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