Staff report

A flash flood warning at 6:55 a.m. Wednesday included Orange and Jefferson Counties, but was lifted at 8:45 a.m., the National Weather Service reported Wednesday morning.

Street flooding was reported in several areas of the county.

Showers and thunderstorms were expected to continue for much of Independence Day, mostly before late afternoon.

“There is some lighter rain left,” said Jared Rackley, forecaster for the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He said rainfall from midnight Wednesday until 10 a.m. at the Jack Brooks Airport was recorded at 3.04 inches, about where the NWS had predicted the high end of rainfall would fall.

For a couple of hours, he said, rain fell at a rate of about an inch an hour.

Chances for showers and thunderstorms remained for the rest of the day, but chances for rain at 9 p.m. Wednesday — that’s when fireworks were scheduled near the Carl A. Parker Center at Lamar College Port Arthur — were 20 percent.

That NWS says chances of rain hover in the 80 percent vicinity in the Port Arthur and Beaumont areas, with new rainfall amounts between a half and three-quarters of an inch.

Thursday, chances of rain will be around 50 percent. It should be partly sunny, with a high near 89, but may feel warmer. New rainfall amounts were expected to be between a tenth and a quarter-inch, except for possibly more in thunderstorms.