Cleanup Begins Red Cross Assesses Damages As Waterlogged Residents Try To Return Life To Normal

As flooding diminished in most parts of Western Washington, many water-weary residents began drying out soggy carpet, towing away vehicles, bringing home the farm animals and disinfecting everything.

At the Diamond M Farms near Monroe, a town 25 miles north of Seattle that was hard-hit by floodwaters, manager Dan Berry said cleanup was the order of the day Saturday. That meant sanitizing stalls, putting in fresh straw and getting the cows back to the farm.

“It’s a job,” he said, sounding tired.

Berry said the dairy’s 1,150 milk cows were “scattered from here to kingdom come” earlier in the week when every major river west of the Cascades - and a handful on the east side - began to rise.

An early damage estimate from the American Red Cross showed 1,680 homes damaged in Snohomish, Skagit, King, Pierce, Whatcom, Thurston, Mason, Lewis, Kittitas, Cowlitz, Clark and Yakima counties.

“The estimate is based on a ‘windshield’ survey, which means looking at the outside of a house and figuring this home has been destroyed or has major or minor damage,” Red Cross spokeswoman Heather Knox said.

Knox did not have a county-by-county breakdown or a dollar estimate of damage, but said the hardest-hit counties appeared to be Skagit and Snohomish.

The National Weather Service said flooding continues on the Skagit River downstream from Mount Vernon, the Snohomish River downstream from Snohomish, the Cedar River, the White River below Mud Mountain Dam and the Cowlitz River from Mayfield Dam downstream.

Close watches were being maintained as the Army Corps of Engineers boosted the release of water from Mud Mountain Dam on the White River northwest of Mount Rainier and Seattle City Light spilled water behind Chester Morse Dam on the Cedar River.

In Mount Vernon, the sun peeked through the clouds after a rain-and-hail storm Saturday morning, said Carol Ann Herring at the local Ace Hardware store.

The store sustained no damage in the flooding, which is just as well because it was busy, she said.

“We sold a lot of sump pumps and shovels in the last two days, and a lot of plastic,” she said.

The trouble started with the “Pineapple Express,” a warm, wet system from the South Pacific that brought heavy rain to the region. The rain and an unseasonable snow melt pushed rivers - and many residents - beyond their limits.

Such floods aren’t that unusual for this region and should be expected to occur again, a meteorologist said.

In 1990, 20 rivers flooded, displacing thousands of people and doing $160 million in damage. In early November, high water killed two people and damaged a railroad bridge.

“There’s nothing about this kind of storm that is at all unusual,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington.

“It’s not a fluke, or a product of global warming. We get them about every five years or so, and we always have,” he said.

The storms in November 1990 and 1995 made for two of the wettest Novembers on record at the SeattleTacoma International Airport - 10.71 inches of rain and 10.40 inches, respectively. But many other Novembers have come close.