The last time I recall seeing a house nearly buried by a mudslide was when I lived in the Columbia River Gorge back in the 1970s, but that's more or less what happened in Lewis County, Washington yesterday: the homeowner has mud in his kitchen as deep as his refrigerator is tall, and his house is mostly buried. Sadly, he'd just bought the place and was in the process of getting homeowner insurance, meaning that he's sort of on his own at present.
Over in Lynden, Washington, the problem isn't mud as yet:
They're dealing with a heck of a lot of snow. Here in Oregon, ice in the Columbia River Gorge has presented a number of issues as well; for the second time in a week, a semi-truck loaded with apples left the freeway and went over the guard-rail, ending up in the river.
Meanwhile, over at the Oregon coast, the problem isn't so much ice and snow as it is melt-off and rain. My wife was in Seaside last week, leading a two-day training workshop, and it appears that she skated out just in the nick of time:
Last week it was ice and snow, but this week...there's five feet of water on the eighth green at Seaside golf course:
“I’m 65 years old and have lived in Seaside my whole life, and I’ve never seen it like this,” said Phil Warmbrodt, owner of Seaside Golf Course. He said the flooding reached across to U Avenue, “and I’ve never seen it do that.”
You might want to forego that particular round.
A few miles west, flooding on Highway 101 forced it to close in the morning, cutting off one of the main arteries into Seaside and Astoria. At one point, ODOT workers said there was 20 inches of water covering the road.
Here in Portland, heavy rains have also caused a lot of flooding - prompting first response teams to water rescue duties as people found themselves trapped in their vehicles due to fast-rising water. And of course, there have been a lot of mudslides.
Good thing they put up a sign, because otherwise a nutty Portlander would probably try to drive over it. The volume of water rushing down N.W. Germantown Road was so large yesterday that many people mistook it for a waterfall. Fortunately, nobody tried to drive through it.