by SONJA ISGER
Last week's rains may have raised the level of Lake Okeechobee and saturated the ground, but in the long run they didn't do much for Palm Beach County, meteorologists say.
"It's like putting a Band-Aid on the wound but your wound hasn't healed and you take the Band-Aid off ... and you still have the wound," National Weather Service drought expert Barry Baxter said. "It's a short-term fix."
All rainy season, meteorologists said South Florida needed something like a slow-moving tropical storm to stall and dump water to help ease the drought. This week's low-pressure system may have been the closest thing to that, but it still fell short. Even with the dousing, areas in Palm Beach County are running rainfall deficits of about 13 inches.
Yet the rains helped. Broward and Miami-Dade counties got between 5 and 7 inches. Palm Beach County received about 2 to 4. Martin and St. Lucie counties saw around 4 inches.
Now come cooler weather. Today's high will be about 77 with a low of 56. Temperatures will rise Sunday to the mid-80s. The weekend is forecast to be mostly sunny.
While severe weather -- including tornadoes, gales and flooding - - was predicted for Tuesday and Wednesday, Palm Beach County was spared.
A tornado came down on the border of Sunrise and Plantation in Broward County Tuesday at about 10 p.m., the National Weather Service confirmed. Fire-rescue officials reported that the tornado packed winds between 111 and 135 mph and damaged 15 to 20 homes. Three people suffered minor injuries, but no one was taken to the hospital.
To the north, rescue crews in Martin County were dispatched to Indiantown near State Road 609 at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. They found a home with "moderate damage," a barn that was completely destroyed and the nearby VFW lodge with a collapsed exterior wall and missing roof.
The rains helped raise Lake Okeechobee to 12.29 feet above sea level, still 1.47 feet below normal but 3.23 inches above what it was last week, officials with the South Florida Water Management District said.
The Kissimmee region basins received 0.50 inches of rain from the storms.
The rain brought South Florida to the lowest drought level -- abnormally dry -- on the U.S. Drought Monitor, Baxter said. But that could change quickly, Baxter said, as meteorologists are forecasting this year's La Nina could be stronger than last year, bringing drier conditions.
"We got some water back in our reserve tanks, but it's not enough to get us through the dry season again," Baxter said.
~ alexandra_seltzer@pbpost.com