Western Washington Sees Pattern of Severe Flooding

Climate change, developers, and logging are blamed

Since the winter of 2006, when a state of emergency was declared for 18 counties in the state, Western Washington has experienced increasingly dramatic annual flooding episodes creating a state of emergency in growing numbers of counties each year.

For the past three years here, the number of roads, farms, buildings, and houses damaged or destroyed increased—helped along by the landslides that usually follow in the wake of such flooding. Although with this year the number of landslides has been somewhat constrained, the total area of flooding has increased from the previous two years (several sections of Interstate 5 remained shut down as of Saturday night, Jan. 10), and tens of thousands of people have had to be evacuated over the past 10 days. The governor declared a state of emergency in late December, which has only abated in the past couple of days.

It would seem that a “trifecta” of reinforcing factors is to blame: climate change (an extra heavy dose of snow, followed by several days of heavy rains), upland forest clear-cutting (leaving less vegetation to soak up water and hold the soil in place), and over-development in flood plane areas (leaving too many people’s houses too low in the face of rising rivers) …all of which set the stage for the current state of emergency. The damage is still being tallied, and although the heavy rains have largely abated, repairs to roads and highways will take months if not a full year (and with state budgets so tight) or more.

• » See also: Oceans’ Ability to Absorb Carbon & Protect Against Climate Change Weakening
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Scientists have been voicing concern over clear cutting and over-development for years—a concern that has grown more vocal since 2001. But as a seventeen year resident of this region, I’ve been hearing and reading ecological warnings since practically the day I arrived by bus. Back then, in the early 1990’s, the argument was that clear-cutting hurt the valuable salmon industry by causing excess soil run off into streams (a process known as siltation), and development was also contributing through the filling in of stream habitat and spawning ground. But those who voiced such concerns were labeled “tree huggers” (”salmon huggers” ?) and were largely assigned to the radical, environmental fringe. But now, formerly less-than-environmentally concerned folks are starting to realize that sound forest management (including preservation of ‘buffer zones’ around streams) and preserving marshland and green space might just be good for people too.

Although current data indicates climate change is happening faster than is predicted by many computer models, from a scientific viewpoint, it is difficult to point to any one storm and say that was caused by global warming (which is believed to facilitate climate change by creating greater extremes of weather, and so also the potential for catastrophic, natural events). The reality is more like an emerging pattern of increasingly worse conditions and storms which seem to point clearly to climate change. It is a globally distributed phenomenon. Locally, we see a patchwork of different effects (depending upon types of environment—dessert, forest, mountain, plane, coastline, etc.) that exist in complex inter-relationships with each other. For this reason, we can not predict all the possible effects and impacts of climate change.

But, as Chief Sealth (Seattle’s namesake) once said: “Whatever man does to the web, he does to himself.”

photo credit: Michael Brunk
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Here’s a link to a flood report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Blame recurring floods on a triple whammy

More environmental news from the Pacific Northwest at:

Sightline Daily – Northwest News that Matters

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