One day when I was a boy in Hokitika (West Coast, South Island, New Zealand) it was raining when I went to school and it got worse, so I had to walk home through water lying everywhere. The water was up to my ankles everywhere, and deeper in lower lying areas. This did not come from the river, but merely from the rain falling, and in nine hours, from memory there was nine inches of rain (a little under 23 cm). This was regarded as exceptional rain then, a once in a hundred year flood.
Now we have global warming so what do we expect? You hear lots of talk about drought, and yes in some parts of the world there will be drought, but in others there will be more rain. The reason is, if the oceans get warmer more water should go into the air. By itself that may not matter too much if the air gets warmer as well, but problems arise if such warm air meets cooler air. This is the sort of thing that causes rain, but now there is more water in the air.
What happens next depends on exactly how the cause behaved. The obvious thing is the rain falls, but when the humidity collapses into rain drops, its going from the gas phase to liquid releases a lot of energy. If there is enough cold air, it might just heat it, especially if the cold came from mountains forcing the air upwards relatively slowly so that it cools and rains on one side of the mountains. That is what happens around Hokitika. Now the hot air blows a strong warm wind over the land to the east, the so-called föhn wind. If the energy cannot be dissipated that way, then stronger circular winds are generated. The tropical cyclones are examples. There was one recently in Madagascar recently that did extreme damage.
So, how will global warming affect these? The short answer is, there will be a variety of ways. Stronger cyclones, more frequent cyclones (because milder systems that get stronger enter the classification) but the more obvious one is more rain because more water has been evaporated. Which gets me back to Hokitika. They have just had a weather system pass over that lasted about a day and a half of continuous rain, and dumped 800 mm of rain in that period (about 31 ½ inches). That is as much as some places get in a year. A little way inland, in the same period they got 1,082 mm, and that is almost 43 inches.
There has been a variety of flooding around the place. A number of houses were inundated because the storm-water drains could not cope and one woman died. Apparently she was driving; she did not like the speed of the water flowing down the road, so she got out. If when driving you see rapidly flowing water of unknown depth ahead, stop and sit it out, or turn back to higher ground. Do not enter. If you are correct in your fear that a car cannot maintain its grip on the road, you walking would be in a worse position. The force of rapidly flowing water will sweep you off your feet, and if it is deep, you are lighter and therefore have less grip. Your grip depends on your weight.
Probably the most frustrating situation has been for tourists south of the Franz Josef glacier, where they are stranded. To the south, the road is apparently cut off around Haast, and to the north of the Fox Glacier, the Waiho bridge was washed out by a river carrying down quite large boulders. A little earlier there were sightseers walking on the bridge, but fortunately they all got off before the bridge went. To give some idea of the water, here are links to two videos of the bridge going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldCjVqfkKFk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPf49aaomYI The first one also gives a brief example of the New Zealand accent, and the vernacular. Note the bridge was a Bailey bridge and is in principle not expected to be permanent.
Once something like this happens, the blame game starts. One argument was that the river has a history of flooding and of eroding out the land and changing course, so why build a more permanent bridge? Another was the crossing is situated on a major fault and apparently the land is not good for foundations. I suspect that since it is in a very low population area, money is also a relevant issue. Where I live, there are a number of bridges across the Hutt river, and it runs along a major fault line, but being in a major metropolitan area, bridges are built. However, another more pertinent accusation came from a local who had complained a few days before that someone excavating the riverbed a little upstream had created a channel that would direct the heaviest rocks in a flood in the direction of the first supports to give way. Oops! No doubt more will follow.
When I wrote that (yesterday), the weather system was still to the south of here but working its way north. Yesterday we had wind gusts of up to 120 k/h, and while the system was working its way north, apart from some heavy rain last night, it had run out of steam. Today it is quite warm, sunny, no problem.
So is this a sign of climate change? A single incident is not, however I note that the “one in a hundred year rain event” in my youth has happened again now, and apparently in the 1980s. This time it has dumped almost four times the amount of water, and the Tasman Sea is about two Centigrade degrees above average this summer. You form your own opinion.