Detroit Deluge: Woman, 100, Found Dead in Flooded Cellar

Record rainfall in the Detroit area has stranded at least 1,000 cars, caused local automakers to delay production, and is now linked to a second death. A 72-year-old woman found her elderly mother's body floating in the flooded basement of the older woman's Warren condo when she went to check on her, reports the AP. Police say it looks like Julia Sarno, 100, drowned after she either suffered a heart attack or perhaps fell while monitoring water levels in her basement, notes CBS Detroit. Another woman died—apparently of cardiac arrest—after she was pulled earlier this week from her water-stranded car in suburban Detroit.

Monday's 4.57-inch downpour, which resulted in what Warren's mayor tells the AP "is going to go down as the great flood of 2014," was Detroit's second-largest rainfall ever recorded in a single day—the record that stands at 4.74 inches was set in 1925, according to the National Weather Service's Detroit office. As Sarno's neighbors mourn the woman described as "much younger than her years," one neighbor tells CBS Detroit that he's irate at the lack of the city's preparedness. "They should have had the sewer system better prepared, the city should have been better prepared for the storm—but they were not prepared at all," he says. (More Detroit flooding stories.)