SNOHOMISH, Washington--Heavy rains drenching the Pacific Northwest triggered flooding on Thursday across much of the region from Oregon north through Washington state and into British Columbia, closing dozens of roads and prompting widespread evacuations.
The intense downpours began earlier in the week, swept into the region by a storm system meteorologists call an atmospheric river, a vast airborne current of dense moisture funneled inland from the Pacific Ocean.
Western Washington state bore the greatest brunt of the storm, with flood watches posted across the Cascade and Olympic mountains and Puget Sound, as well as for a northern slice of Oregon, a region home to some 5.8 million people, according to the U.S. National Weather Service.The same storm system brought heavy showers and flooding to western Montana and an edge of northern Idaho.
Roughly 100,000 residents in western Washington were under "Level 3" evacuation orders urging them to immediately move to higher ground, the bulk of them in rural Skagit County north of Seattle, said Karina Shagren, spokesperson for the state emergency management division.
Shagren said swift-water rescue teams had been deployed across the region, but there were no reports of casualties or of people missing or stranded in the flooding. So far, levees and dikes were holding, she added.
The Weather Service said the storm had dumped 5 to 10 inches (12.7 to 25.4 cm) of rain over wide swaths of the Pacific Northwest, with 72-hour totals reaching more than a foot as of Thursday along the western flanks of the Cascades."It's a lot of water," Shagren said, even for a region accustomed to soggy weather conditions.
