A Hard Rain Went and Fell

Thurday, January 8, 2009

Today Vail Road was closed south of my place where it goes over the Deschutes River and in the other direction up by the turn off into Yelm along Black Hills Road was closed too. I had over 4" of rain at my house yesterday! The winds are fierce but we're not even close to getting the worst of it. There are talking heads on the TV saying worst flooding EVER.

I had work in Seattle and was going to stay and have dinner with friends but I bolted for the south as soon as I finished the session and it was akin to fleeing Sodom. I did not look back but I heard roads were closing behind me as I monitored the radio. I had to drive the diciest section of I-5 (in the urban area) by Tacoma. They ended up evacuating 7,000 people from the area beside that spot of freeway by the time I got home. They also closed a 20 mile section of I-5 just south of the alpaca farm. They had had terrible flooding just south of there last year. For awhile there was no way to go by road or rail from Seattle to Portland. The back roads were closed or flooded too. Seattle's kind of cut off since all the passes through the Cascades are closed from snow, landslide or avalanche. I'm not sure how that rehab is going but I'll get the scoop on the 5:00 news coming up in an hour or so.

A good lesson some leaders learned from the devastation in Lewis County last year was to design an emergency plan for evacuation of critters in the rural areas. Last year they lost a dreadful amount of horses and cattle, sheep, goats and alpacas. Nearby Pierce County had a plan in place and the critters there are fine today. They evacuated about 22,000 people in that area and who knows how many cloven hoofs.

I went to the store, after being turned back on those two different roads to town, bought 30 lbs of food for Judy Dog and the fixins for a huge pot of Irish Stew for me and I'm fixing on fixing that up tonight to take me through the weekend. I will not be in a fix unless I lose power before the crock pot is finished. Then I use the burner on my BBQ grill.