Morning, muchachos.
Morning, Page2Raz. How's things progressing in your area?
Still flooding, and another atmospheric river incoming. This one will be weaker, but will aggravate the flooding.
Flooding still hasn't impacted me particularly, other than a brief loss of power on Thursday evening. But it was eerie to see the rivers running so high as I was driving out to Belfair Thursday night. They were down a couple of feet when I returned yesterday. But they'll come back up as the flood control dams release water during the next AR. The devastation is in the Snohomish County lowlands, which is 60 miles north of me, though there's enough in northwest Auburn to make it a challenge for my #1 son to get to work.
We have a couple of friends who are under "be aware" warnings, which precede "evacuate" order, and we've offered to put them up if they get evacuated. We also have some acquaintences who have family who have been victimized by the flooding. Parents of one of my wife's coworkers got physically swept out of their home by a landslide. It didn't kill or significantly injure them, thank God, but her dad had to dig his wife out because she was trapped up to her thighs in the mud. And their home is pretty much toast.
So, no direct impact on us, but it's pretty nasty in other places.
That's nuts, I cant imagine actually being swept out of the house like it was a waterpark. Pictures out of the affected area look terrible.
I'd submit that's somewhat illusive. This amount of precipitation would be apocalyptic in most of the rest of the United States, because the ground simply can't manage the water. Even Louisiana, which is as experienced with hydrologic phenomena as the rain shadow of the Cascade Range, would struggle because so much of Louisiana is below water level. But as bad as it looks on the news, the problem spots are mostly due to human venality and stupidity. It was completely predictable that one neighborhood in Enumclaw would flood, because it was essentially built on a drained swamp that required two retention ponds. I have friends that lived in that neighborhood, and when they bought their house there I told them that it was potentially problematic. A lot of old-timers in Enumclaw had complained about the development and construction there. In fairness, the flooding there didn't reach the houses themselves, but people were trapped because they couldn't get out of their driveways, unless they happened to own a full-size, lifted 4WD truck (what we call out here a "Clawmobile," after the colloquial nickname for Enumclaw - "The 'Claw").
Point is, it looks uglier on television than it actually is, but that's because they don't give you the perspective that most of the geography either can handle that much water because it has for eons, or that there's a lot of effective engineering that happened in the 20th century to make more of the geography livable. That doesn't mean your tax dollars won't be coming out here for people who made bad decisions about where to build their homes, and that local government made stupid decisions about allowing them, but with all due respect to those who've been devestated, it looks worse on television than it really is.
