Avalanche and Floods: Rainpocalypse 2009!

From Yahoo:

Warmer temperatures and heavy rains were melting snow dumped on the mountains during a weekend storm, with 10 inches of snow melting in a 12-hour period at Snoqualmie Pass, about 50 miles east of Seattle, Haner said.

In Snoqualmie, a town 25 miles east of Seattle, kayakers paddled in the street as city officials urged residents in the flood plain of the Snoqualmie River to leave before they became trapped.

Volunteers gathered at a city park to stuff sandbags for residents to protect their homes. June Garvin said she lived high on a ridge outside the danger area but wanted to help. "The river came up so fast that for some people, sorry to say, sandbags aren't going to do a darn thing," Garvin said. "The water's going to get in if it wants to."

Chris Caviezel, who has lived at Snoqualmie Pass for about seven years, said conditions were the worst he has seen. "We're getting avalanches and we're being flooded," Caviezel said.

As of early Wednesday evening, Marblemount saw nearly 6 inches of rain and almost 7 inches of rain fell at Snoqualmie Pass in the past 24 hours. The weather service predicted another 4 to 8 inches of rain would fall on the coast and Cascades through Wednesday night and 1 to 3 inches elsewhere in the region.

Judging by photos taken today of Snoqualmie Falls, it seems like an identical reoccurrence of what I saw in 2006 when I took this photo:



I was going to head down the road and take a photo of the falls tomorrow (it's only 2 miles away) but I think I might wait until Friday and take Hyeon Ju who arrives tomorrow afternoon. She, the other students, and the South Korean delegation are supposed to tour the area on Friday, but there's a sizable swath of the downtown area underwater today and school has been cancelled for tomorrow (possibly Friday too, we're told) so she might be stuck hanging out with me on Friday.

Hope she likes to play Rock Band.