Wild Weather in the Great NorthWet

[Trebuchet]

Been quite interesting the past few days.

Snow Saturday. Snow Sunday. That's a rare event around here, usually just about once a winter. Sunday morning we were driving south from Port Townsend, WA, to Tacoma. Heavy snowfall on the the Kitsap peninsula between the Hood Canal bridge and Bremerton. Many, many vehicles in the ditch, mostly pickups and four-wheel-drives. We saw several spin out but recover.

Monday the temperature went up nearly 30 degrees F. The warmest I saw on Sunday was 34, Monday was 59. Torrential rain. It rains a lot of the time here, but rarely rains hard. This time it poured all day. 3.5 inches in Seattle, considerably more further south. And wind, wind, wind.

Significant "Urban and small stream flooding", to quote the warnings. Enough to close I-5 near Centralia and cause major damage in many areas. The worst was in Southwest Washington and down into Oregon, I believe.

Anyhow, back to reasonably normal today. I'm glad, that was enough.

[Maksutov]

IIRC, some areas up there also got some decent winds, with gusts well over 100 MPH.

[Trebuchet]

Yes, I think that was mainly on the coast. It was windy enough here. It'll be interesting to see what it was at the vacation house in Port Townsend when I get back up there, we have a weather station to record the peaks. Hopefully we haven't had more damage to the roof, I used up all my spare shingles just two weeks ago. I think the wind there was mainly from the South, which isn't too bad for us. West winds are the killers, the next land west of us is Taiwan. (We look right down the Strait of Juan de Fuca.) Although the latest damage to the roof was from the east. There's trees to the south so that's best.

[Maksutov]

Slightly OT, but, when you're slinging pumpkins, etc., is there a wind penalty/bonus factored in? Kind of like what happens in some road races?

[Trebuchet]

No, but it could be. The big event in Delaware this year was seriously hampered by Hurricane Noel. They had a new field with the machines ranged around three sides, and claimed every shot was into the wind! At our event the wind caught a high one and took it off course and out of the park. I thought it was going to hit a dairy warehouse, which already got hit two years ago. But it cleared it. And cleared someone's house. No damage, but a close call. We gotta get a bigger park.

[Gillianren]

In the category of "urban flooding," some friends of mine discovered that they had a crack in the foundation of their building when one of them got up and the carpet went "squish." By the time I got there, several hours later (they're only across the street, but I got the notice just as Graham's mom was about to show up to take us to run errands), there was about two inches of standing water in their kitchen. Their carpets in their rooms were sodden.

Fortunately, there was another three-bedroom apartment in the complex that hadn't had its painting done before its new tenants moved in (three-bedroom apartments are very rare around here), so they were able to move into that; with luck, its intended occupants will take their place after it's repaired and cleaned and has its carpets replaced. But the reason I didn't post much yesterday was that I was helping them move everything they own across a parking lot. (Well, helping is a relative term. Mostly, I was moral support.)

[mike alexander]

Seems the worst stayed north and west of us (being about 35 mi SW of Portland). Had quite a bit of rain, blustery, but mainly knocking off the small twigs and chunks of lichen.