On Wild Weather, Or, A Note To California

In our last conversation there was some mention of snow in my part of the world (the western slope of Washington’s Cascade Mountains); but all that water has instead been falling as rain the past few days...washing away all the snow that had accumulated in the lowlands...and much of the several feet of snow that has fallen in the mountains over the past two weeks.

The result of all that water, all at once (many areas saw more than 10 inches of rain in 48 hours), has been a flood event unlike any I’ve seen in decades of living in this area.

The Girlfriend’s Mother lives in San Diego (where she has had her own series of exciting emergency events); and to keep her reassured I sent along a note describing how it went—and for quite a few of us, how it’s still going.

By the time I was done I realized I’d written a story—and that’s what I have for you today, Gentle Reader...a few words about Big Weather and how we deal with it.

Well, anyway, they come over to help us celebrate the Golden
Wedding and it was pretty crimpy weather and the furnace don't seem
to heat up no more like it used to and Mother made the remark that
she hoped this winter wouldn't be as cold as the last, referring to
the winter previous. So Edie said if she was us, and nothing to keep
us home, she certainly wouldn't spend no more winters up here and why
didn't we just shut off the water and close up the house and go down
to Tampa, Florida?

--From “The Golden Honeymoon”, Ring Lardner, Jr.

A few comments before we get to the letter, if I may:

--First, some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent...and some haven’t.

--Additionally, you should know that this is the follow on to other notes on the same topic. I will add context as needed.

--The original note did not contain links...which means you, Gentle Reader, are getting extra “value added” content for your reading dollar.

With all that said, let’s get to the note I sent to San Diego:

When I talked to you the other day Seattle was cut off from every other major city on the West Coast, but things are almost back to normal now.

It was impossible to even get from Seattle to Tacoma, but I-5 is now open all the way south to Portland and north to Vancouver, BC.

Some of the area near where [The Girlfriend] might have to transfer if [her place of employment] were to ever close (the town of Pacific) is still flooded because they are releasing water on the town to relieve strain on a dam upriver. They will be under water for at least a few more days because it will rain again tomorrow, and that means they will have to keep releasing water from the dam onto the town.

Snoqualmie Pass (I-90) has finally opened...which means trucks can now go from Seattle to the Midwest and East Coast...but the State Department of Transportation traffic advisory radio says that driving, stopping, and parking are prohibited on the shoulders of I-90 from North Bend to Easton (about 70 miles) because the flooding might have undermined the roadway--which means if you stop your car on the side of the road it might collapse under you. The unspoken message? Don't get a flat tire.

We have never heard that kind of message from the DOT radio before.

(It is reported that the DOT had to clear 1 million cubic feet of snow in one day to keep Snoqualmie Pass open. Of course, avalanche control makes the opening an intermittent thing, and new snow piling up over old snow makes the problem worse.)

It is not possible to do the loop that we took with Diana from Seattle to Roslyn (where "Northern Exposure" was filmed...we went there with [The Girlfriend’s Sister]) and then on to Leavenworth (the Bavarian town up north in the mountains) because the road going north is both flooded and subject to landslides...or it's already covered by landslides.

That's about 100 miles of road closed, and there is no known date for reopening the road. (As of this writing only 40 miles of the road remains closed...still with no known date for reopening.)

Most towns are now no longer cut off around here...and my friend Sadie put a note up on her MySpace page to tell people that she had 6 feet of water around her house. She lives in Snoqualmie, which was one of the towns completely cut off from everywhere else during the flood. Most houses in Snoqualmie are elevated because it floods so often, and she basically lives on the second floor, which many other people there also do. She has horses, and she said they were also safe. (Sadly, we just learned that her dog, Mia, has now gone missing...so if you happen to see a pit bull/English bulldog mix wandering around looking lost...)

She did not leave even though Snoqualmie residents were told to evacuate.
Because she had no way to evacuate the horses, she stayed.

I called her to check up on her during the flooding. She said she was sick of being housebound by herself and wanted to go out. The Girlfriend was sitting next to me in the car while we were talking, and suggested Sadie could use a rowboat. What The Girlfriend did not know is that Sadie does have a rowboat, and the problem was that her property is surrounded by blackberries that are more than 6 feel tall...and a locked gate.

She was telling me that in order to get out, in the boat, she would either have to somehow get it over the blackberries (they have sharp thorns, so you do not want to mess with them) or row up to the gate, try to find the lock that's on a chain in the water somewhere, get it unlocked, get the gate open (while floating in a rowboat), and row somewhere.

My suggestion? Float some sheets of plywood over to the berries and make a sort of bridge out of them, then drag the boat across.

She was thinking about it when we ended the call, and I still don't know what she did. The advantage of the plywood was that it wouldn't weigh anything to get it over to the berries, so she could float several sheets over in one trip.

I forget to mention...when we were talking to her there was only 5 feet of water out front instead of 6, so it was going down.
She had also just got her power back after about 24 hours of being dark.

In Carnation, today, (about 15 miles down the valley from us) and also in Duvall (about 20 miles downstream), they were still using helicopters to make 911 calls because the fire department couldn't get in; but the National Guard was expected to be able to get in with their vehicles tonight. Most people there won't have power until the flooding dies down...probably another day or two.

There are towns like Arlington up north that are still getting lots of water from upriver (every river in western Washington flooded, many to all-time records), so it will be a few more days for them.

We are seeing big potholes, of course, because the ground under the roads is either saturated and muddy...or washed away.

The intersection right next door is still flooding, but it is no longer 2 feet deep on the road, just a few inches.

Our front door is at least 10 feet above the spot that's flooding, so it would have to get at least 12 feet deep there before we would even begin to be concerned...and it only got about 3 feet deep at the height of the "all-time record" flooding, which means we are quite safe--unless Noah moves in and starts a boat building project.

Have a look at the local paper's stories...
http://Seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/395249_storm09.html

...and the CBS News version, from a week ago, reporting on the snowfall that caused much of the flooding when it melted the past couple of days.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/02/national/main4695714.shtml?source=rssattr=u.s._4695714

So there you go: we did fine, some of my friends are no longer cut off (but they were)...and to make things exciting, we have at least one, maybe two more good soakings on the way before we get a few days of actual dry weather. (I’m guessing, but we probably got somewhere between 10 and 15 inches of rain in two days...along with the snowmelt, which probably added another 3 to 6 inches of water to the rainfall for everyone to deal with.)

I'll let you know if we get any more good stories...but let me tell you, this was some big-time flood.

Hopefully you saw the pictures I pointed you to in my first note. There are about 25 there now, if you did not see them all.

So that’s the note I sent...but I have an update or two for today’s readers:

--Lots of pavement was torn away from important roads all over this half of the state by the flooding, and a substantial number of them will be closed for either days or weeks until they can be rebuilt.

--You know the “lost dog” and “lost cat” signs that occasionally appear in your neighborhood? The Girlfriend reports that she saw a “lost koi” sign today on the way home...which was presumably the result of a pond being overrun by flooding.

Quite a month we’ve had up here—and winter is really just getting started.

Of course, there is a bright side: it’s kept me from having to write about the minutiae of the transition...and it’s allowed me to follow the Gaza story more closely—a subject to which we’ll return next time we get together.

On Living in Nature, Or, All The Weather Seems To Come Here

It is reported that 2/3 of the world’s population have never seen snow-and there are times when I wish I belonged to that group.

There is great variety to be found in the accursed stuff, however, which is why the Yup’ik, in their wanderings around Southwestern Alaska, express the conditions of the snow that surrounds them in so many different ways.

For a writer who lives in the world of the Yup’ik (or for that matter, anywhere along the North American Pacific coast south to more or less Coos Bay, Oregon), there’s also a great similarity between the storms that mark daily existence and the writing process itself.

If you’ve never seen snow...or the flooding that can follow a storm...if you’re all too familiar...or if you just wondered what the heck a lexeme is...today’s conversation is for you.

For all of this to make sense, we better begin by setting the stage.

Today’s conversation, as we said, takes place along the Pacific Coast of North America. The coastline is paralleled by multiple mountain ranges: the Coast Ranges of Oregon, Washington’s Olympics, the Cascades (which bisect Oregon and Washington), the giant wrinkle in the Earth that is Vancouver Island, the fantastically complicated Pacific and Kitimat Ranges of British Columbia, and the equally fjord- and forest-studded Boundary Ranges that bring the reader into Alaska. It even reaches out to the Canadian Rockies and the headwaters of the Columbia, Yukon, Copper, and Frasier Rivers.

To paint a simple picture, much of the land in this region consists of either forested mountains upon which enormous amounts of water fall, or the lowlands through which the runoff from those mountains must flow. Around here, anything under 3000 feet (1000 meters for my world readers) doesn’t hardly count, and many peaks go well above 10,000 feet.

Trees can grow more than 300 feet (100 meters) tall.

The reason so much water falls here is because we are the first land encountered by nearly every storm moving east across the Pacific, thanks to the jet stream, which can either scoop up the warm and highly saturated Western Pacific air and transport it north from the tropics right at us (the “Pineapple Express”); or run the air north past the Aleutian Islands and from there south at us, creating...well, creating some miserable and awful weather.

The kind only a Norwegian could love.

How much water are we talking about? The National Park Service reports that parts of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula receive 140 to 167 inches of rain annually (that’s 350 to 425cm...). Forks, Washington (it’s located right at the most northwestern spot in the State) has averaged 118 inches (300cm) of rain the past 20 years-and reported over 160 inches twice in those two decades.

It’s not like Florida rain, either. Many days, it rains half an inch or less...but the sky is often gray, and there’s often a mist or drizzle (think Scotland or New Zealand or Peru). How many days? NOAA tells us that residents of Juneau, Alaska can expect an average of 223 rainy days a year (see p. 45), 193 days in Astoria, Oregon (the mouth of the Columbia River), or 208 days in Quillayute, Washington; as compared to a mere 120 days in Mobile, Alabama, the American city widely described as our rainiest.

As for Vancouver Island and the British Columbia coast?
Surfers there require a wetsuit-just for the rain.

(Quick joke-if Noah lived here, he’d say to God: “40 days...that’s not really much of a threat, you know...”)

The basic explanation for all of this is that these moisture-laden storms come blowing in off the Pacific, and the clouds are too wet and heavy to climb over the mountains-until they dump enough water to get past...then they hit the next mountains, and the process repeats...until the coast becomes a giant holding facility full of retained water. And then, depending on the temperature, you have either a giant snowpack-or the floods begin.

(Just so you know: the most snow ever around here in 12 months?
1140 inches (that is not a typo; it’s 2895cm) at Mt. Baker, Washington during the 1998-99 season.)

Sometimes we get both rain and snow.
Like the last few days.

As we touched upon a moment ago, there are many kinds of rain: the mist, the on-and-off drizzle, soupy fog, your basic downpour...and all of them can be complicated by the addition of wind, and changes in temperature. (Warm rain is an entirely different animal than cold rain, and it is hard to find weather much more miserable than windblown rain at just above freezing-unless you live on permafrost...and especially after you’ve had it every day for the past, oh, let’s say...55 days.)

And in this part of the world, it’s not uncommon to have all of this weather on the same day...with occasional sunbreaks during the rest of the week. (This week’s Port Alberni, BC, weather forecast illustrates the point nicely.)

Which brings us back to the Yup’ik and lexemes.
Lexemes, you say?

... Roughly, a lexeme can be thought of as an independent vocabulary item or dictionary entry. It's different from a word since a lexeme can give rise to more than one distinctly inflected word. Thus English has a single lexeme speak which gives rise to inflected forms like speaks, spoke, and spoken.
--Anthony Woodbury, Counting Eskimo words for snow: A citizen's guide

As there are many forms of rain, there are also many forms of snow; and the Yup’ik have 15 lexemes for snow and its various forms. Just as with writing, storms have a “story arc” that creates a progression of rains and snows (and the occasional “ice fog”, an especially nasty weather that turns roads into skating rinks)...and that’s really where this story is going.

The story always begins with the warnings: the actual National Weather Service and Department of Transportation alerts, and the local news, preparing us for (stealing from “The Daily Show”) The Storm Of The Century Of The Week.

And that’s what we got on Thursday: “Look out, this is gonna be a big one!”

I worked all night Thursday and as I checked the weather there was really nothing. I went to bed to gray skies and a “bare and wet” landscape.

As I awoke Friday afternoon I looked out the window and...

...snow was everywhere!

Not so deep yet (maybe 4 inches...10cm), but the big flakes were falling rapidly.
Suddenly it was 6 inches-and it’s time to make some decisions about shoveling.

There are two reasons why shoveling matters:

--If a lot of snow falls, the compression and accumulated moisture can turn the fluffy, powdery snow into “concrete”, making the process at least twice as difficult.

--If the compressed and uncleared snow refreezes, it will form a virtually impossible to remove crust of ice-making walking and driving way too exciting (amazing video-don’t miss this!) for my taste.

By now the snowflakes are alternating between larger and smaller-with the smaller flakes falling faster...but the fallen snow is still light and fluffy (powder!), so at that point, the shoveling began. It’s about 28 degrees F. (-2 C.).

There’s about 300 square feet to be cleared, 6 inches deep (15cm), and lots more falling, even as I shovel. Well, to be accurate, I’m pushing the snow at this point, because it’s still light and easy to move.

My current snow shovel is my favorite ever: about a foot wide (30cm), thick, plastic (aluminum shovels always seem to bend at the corners or the rivets fail-I hate that), and able to easily slide, even full of the heaviest snow. The less you lift the better in this job, so sliding the full shovel as much as possible is a good thing. Of course, at some point you still have to lift the snow to remove it, but as of now that’s not a big problem.

After half an hour or so a good third of the work is done; and it’s time for a break. The snow is still powdery, and it’s changing from big, fluffy flakes to an icier, more granular flake. Not an ice pellet...but instead more like the difference between sorbet and granite. Still 26-28 degrees F.

Only the snow is still falling, and there’s a covering over the “cleared” driveway.

For those who have never been to the snow, there’s a process of jacket removal that must be observed.

Did some work inside-and now there’s 8 inches on the ground...including almost 2 inches over the “cleared area”. But it’s still fluffy, so the reclearing goes very fast...but the rest of the driveway now has 8 inches to remove, and the snow is turning into tiny ice pellets, then back to small flakes, then back to large, for more or less the next 3 to 4 hours. At this point, about ¾ inch per hour (almost 2cm) is falling.

The next portion of the driveway’s snow is not as light as the first area; the compression having its effect and moisture accumulating in the snowmass...but it’s still not too bad, because it’s not yet raining.

After another hour it’s time for another break...and I’m just past 50%.
It’s medium heavy snow, and now it’s hard work.

I’ve been listening to an old-school country playlist as I work; and the falling snow makes a great counterpoint to Kitty Wells and Merle Travis...but the last song is the new school “Texas” from Willie Nelson, so it’s break time.

There’s 9 inches now, according to my handy ruler stuck in the snow on the barbrque. It’s no longer so granular, as the weather has begun to warm-and the snow is now heavy to lift. The last 10 feet or so are the hardest, as mixed rain and snow are falling.

By the time the snow is cleared, a foot has fallen (30cm), but the rain is picking up...and by the time I’m writing this (24 hours after the shoveling ended)-and the temperature has risen 20 degrees to the 40s F., and it was over 50 degrees F. (10 C.) during the afternoon.

The wind has become huge...with gusts above 100 mph (160 km) reported in multiple locations. It never stopped blowing all night, and it’s still blowing as the sun comes up.

And the rain never stopped-in fact, near legendary amounts (almost 14”-that’s 35 cm-in Bremerton, Washington for example) have fallen in the last 48 hours wreaking havoc over the area-all rivers in the Western Washington are threatening to flood or have already, the Governor of Oregon has declared an emergency (and road closures have virtually cut the Oregon Coast off from any access to the interior), and I have just heard Washington’s Governor has done the same.

I-5, the main north-south highway running from Vancouver, BC to Tijuana, Mexico (connecting Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego) is under an estimated 8 to 9 feet (3 meters) of water; and will not be passable for a currently unknown length of time. The water is 5 feet above any previous record.

The only available detours are so circuitous that the trip from Seattle to Portland (normally 160 miles one way) is now 275 miles longer-requiring a trip to Yakima, and making a one way trip over 400 miles (640 km).

Roads are literally falling off hillsides. (Click on the "Slideshow" link.)

Helicopters have been performing rescues since yesterday.

One of our favorite restaurants, the Ranch House BBQ, located outside Olympia, Washington has been destroyed, we have just been told (click on the “Mudslide Destroys Olympia Restaurant” link).

Our godson (the one who did not join the military) and his parents live in an exceptionally hard-hit area, Gray's Harbor County, who are at this moment some of the 80,000 without power-and the projections are that it will remain that way for them for at least a week. They are right at the Pacific coast, and there are so many downed trees that there’s going to be enough free firewood for at least two cold winters, for those lucky enough to grab it up.

It is an amazing story, but I’m going to stop at this point, do some actual newsgathering, and see what I can report as the day develops.

I’ll leave you with this thought: when we began we discussed the similarity between the arc of the storm and the arc of the story...and there could not be a better example of that than the story that is arcing before us even as we speak.

Stay tuned...and if I have useful updates I’ll post them here.