The Pacific north-west is reeling from catastrophic flooding that inundated communities across the region this week, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate and prompting a federal emergency declaration.
Torrential rain rapidly filled rivers and triggered flooding on Thursday from Oregon north through Washington state and into British Columbia, causing mudslides and tearing homes from their foundations. Authorities have closed dozens of roads in response to the emergency and issued evacuation warnings for 100,000 people.
The record flood waters were expected to continue to slowly recede on Saturday, but authorities have warned that water levels will remain high for days, and that there is still danger from potential levee failures or mudslides. There is also the threat of more rain forecast for Sunday. No deaths have so far been reported.
Authorities have yet to estimate the costs, but photos and videos show widespread damage, with entire communities or neighborhoods flooded around western and central Washington. Officials have conducted dozens of water rescues, debris and mudslides have closed highways, and raging torrents have washed out roads and bridges.
The rain arriving on Sunday will cause rivers to rise again, said Robert Ezelle, director of the Washington Military Department’s emergency management division.
Bob Ferguson, the governor of Washington, on Friday morning warned that flooding “remains extremely unpredictable” and rivers were expected to continue to rise. He declared a statewide emergency on Wednesday in response to the weather, and Donald Trump on Friday approved the state’s request for an emergency declaration, Ferguson said.
The Washington national guard has been deployed to affected areas and helped to rescue residents trapped by flood waters. Meanwhile, California announced it would send 150 emergency personnel, including search-and-rescue teams, to the state to assist with the response.
The intense rain began earlier in the week with a storm system meteorologists call an atmospheric river, a vast airborne current of dense moisture funneled inland from the Pacific Ocean, that inundated the region with water.
Western Washington state bore the brunt of the storm, with flood watches posted for the Cascade and Olympic mountains and Puget Sound, as well as for a northern slice of Oregon, home to 5.8 million people, according to the US National Weather Service. In recent days, authorities have rescued people from rooftops and submerged vehicles. The Associated Press reported that in Snoqualmie, a herd of elk could be seen swimming through neck-high water on a flooded football field.
The same storm system has also brought heavy showers and flooding to western Montana and an edge of northern Idaho.
Early on Friday morning, all the residents of the small city of Burlington, in western Washington, roughly halfway between Seattle and Bellingham, a total of about 10,000 people, were told by the authorities to evacuate. National Guard were going door to door and shelters were being prepared, local media outlets reported.
In addition, roughly 100,000 residents across wider western Washington on Friday were under level 3 evacuation orders urging them to immediately move to higher ground, the bulk of them in rural Skagit county north of Seattle, said Karina Shagren, a spokesperson for the state emergency management division.
About 3,800 evacuees were believed to be in need of temporary shelter, Skagit county emergency chief Julie de Losada said.
First responders have rescued several people, including by helicopter in King and Whatcom counties in recent days.
The worst flooding was reported along the Skagit, Snohomish and Puyallup rivers. More than 30 highways and dozens of smaller roads were closed due to flooding across the region, state officials said. In some communities, residents have been urged to boil water to ensure it is safe to consume.
Several lengthy segments of the BNSF Railway, a major freight line serving the Pacific north-west, were washed out or closed due to flooding, the company said, citing reported rainfall of 10 to 17in or more in many areas.
Some rivers have been cresting several feet above record levels and on Friday morning had not receded.
In British Columbia, five of the six Canadian highways leading to the Pacific port city of Vancouver were shut down due to floods, falling rocks and the risk of avalanches, local authorities said on Thursday.
“This situation is evolving and very dynamic,” said the transport ministry of British Columbia.
Access to Vancouver relies largely on a limited highway and railway network that crosses the Rocky Mountains.
While such storms are not uncommon on the US Pacific coast, meteorologists say they are likely to become more frequent and extreme over the next century if global heating from the human-induced climate crisis continues at current rates.
With Associated Press
