Rains unleash flooding, evacuations in US and Canada
Heavy rains triggered flooding across much of the Pacific Northwest from northern Oregon to Washington state and British Columbia, closing dozens of roads and prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Heavy showers that began earlier in the week were dragged into the region by a storm system that meteorologists call an atmospheric river; this was a broad air current of dense moisture flowing inland from the Pacific Ocean.
According to the US National Weather Service, flood watches were made for the Cascade and Olympic mountains and Puget Sound, as well as the northern part of Oregon, home to approximately 5.8 million people, while Western Washington state was hit the hardest by the storm.
The same storm system brought heavy downpours and flooding to western Montana and part of northern Idaho.
About 100,000 residents in Western Washington are under a Level 3 evacuation order, calling for them to immediately move to higher ground, mostly in rural Skagit County north of Seattle, said Karina Shagren, a spokeswoman for the state’s emergency management department.
Skagit County emergency chief Julie de Losada said about 3,800 evacuees are believed to need temporary shelter.
Shagren said swift water rescue teams were deployed to the area, but there were no reports of people missing or stranded in the flood.
The worst flooding was reported on the Skagit, Snohomish and Puyallup rivers. State officials said more than 30 highways and dozens of minor roads were closed throughout the region due to flooding.
Many long sections of the BNSF Railroad, a major freight line serving the Pacific Northwest, were flooded or closed due to flooding, the company said.
Officials said they were bracing for the Skagit River to rise above record levels near the Skagit County towns of Mount Vernon and Burlington, potentially topping levees and testing their strength for the first time since repairs were made after the last major flood in that area in 2021.
“The situation is unpredictable, dangerous, and we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when these floodwaters come,” said Robert Ezelle, director of the state’s emergency management division.
The storm dumped 127 to 254 mm of rain across large swaths of the Pacific Northwest, with 72-hour totals rising to more than 300 mm as of Thursday along the western flanks of the Cascades, the Weather Service said.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson issued a statewide emergency declaration to step up federal disaster relief amid forecasts of devastating flooding and rivers expected to reach historic levels.
Five of six Canadian highways leading to the Pacific port city of Vancouver in British Columbia have been closed due to flooding, falling rocks and avalanche risk, local officials said.
The atmospheric river storm was expected to subside, but the Weather Service warned that continued rains continue to pose a flood threat in the rain-saturated region.
