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.

Massive Lightning Storm

The storm that rolled through Wednesday night was unlike any I had experienced since leaving North Carolina in 2002. The meteorologists recorded 3,000 lightning strikes in 24 hours and let me tell you, three of them couldn't have struck more than 1/4 mile from my house.

Thunderstorms are one of the things missing from life in the Pacific Northwest, we just don't get them too often up here. And I miss that. I love the sound of the thunder, the flashing of the lights, and the smell of electrified rain. On the rare occasion that we do get a thunderstorm, it's typically a rather mellow event and over within minutes.

And then there was the storm on Wednesday. It went on forever, as if the cells were circling above our neighborhood. The bolts were massive, the house shook, the rumbling came instantaneously after the crackling flash of light. My friend Erik (who posted an awesome photo here), who lives down the road, says his smoke detectors went off several times that night.

Sleep was hard to come by, and the storm was bad enough to warrant unplugging the computer and monitor, among other things. When I finally did fall asleep sometime in the middle of the night, I was woken just two hours later by yet another storm. And another bolt that I can only assume touched down somewhere on my block.

It was an absolutely amazing storm. I was too tired to even think about taking photos but some Snoqualmie Ridge residents were more motivated than I.

See some pretty great photos of the lightning right here.