Worst May Be Over for Northwest After Week of Rain

SEATTLE —  Storms began dying down Wednesday and the new year brought hope that the worst was over for the weary Northwest, where a week of heavy snow and rain followed by record warmth has swelled rivers and created dangerous mudslides.

“Things are definitely beginning to taper off,” National Weather Service forecaster Sten Tjaden said.

But the break came too late for many.

Ron Ricker’s Shell gas station collapsed into a sinkhole during the night in suburban Lake Forest Park.

The station is beside “a small, meandering creek that now looks like the Columbia River,” Ricker said. The creek undermined the station and “it basically went straight down,” he said.

Elsewhere, 26 homes had to be evacuated when a huge sinkhole opened in a street in Shoreline, a suburb north of Seattle.

And a mudslide knocked at least one home off its foundation in the wealthy Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia.

Other mudslides were reported around the region, and one downtown Seattle apartment building had to be evacuated.

Flood warnings remained in effect for 17 rivers around Washington as the rain combined with melting snow from the two previous storms.

But most were expected to crest during the night with only minor flooding.

Roads were swamped at Aberdeen in west-central Washington as water from the swollen Chehalis River ran up against the incoming midday tide in Grays Harbor.

Early Wednesday, Seattle posted a record high of 54 degrees for the date, and warm wind shot the mercury up to 77 at Walla Walla, erasing a record of 63 that had stood since 1917.

No serious injuries were reported from Wednesday’s weather, although 14 deaths have been blamed on the series of storms in Oregon and Washington since Christmas. The Red Cross reported that 395 people spent the night in shelters.

Forecasters in Oregon warned of a possibility of significant flooding late this week in the Portland suburbs of Tualatin and Lake Oswego.

Flood watches were posted along most tributaries of the Willamette River.

Rain and snow showers also streamed eastward through Idaho into Montana and Wyoming, with up to a foot possible on some mountain peaks.

Portland wound up its second-wettest year on record, with 63.56 inches, the weather service said. The record is the 67.24 inches that fell in 1871.

A landslide early Wednesday blocked a state highway in the northern part of the state, dropping two boulders so big that state road crews were going to have to blast them, said spokesman Ron Scheele.

One of the boulders was the size of “at least four dump trucks,” Scheele said.

Wind gusted up to 100 mph along the southern Oregon coast, toppling trees and utility poles, with gusts to 60 mph along the central Washington coast at Hoquiam.

The high wind during the night caused power outages in western Washington for more than 113,000 customers, up from 34,000 on Tuesday.

Washington’s east-west highway traffic across the Cascades was getting back to normal on two major routes after being shut down by avalanches.

The third route, Interstate 90 through 3,000-foot Snoqualmie Pass, was close to being reopened for the first time since Dec. 26.

Washington Gov. Mike Lowry has declared a state of emergency in 19 counties hit by the storms, which have flooded homes and businesses and caused havoc on the roads.

In Snohomish County northeast of Seattle, a search and rescue team was looking for three hikers who were due back last Sunday from a snowshoeing trip in the mountains but had not yet returned.