Flood!!

2024 Christmas lights

If you pay attention to national news, I'm told we were on it.  Last week we had record breaking floods here in western WA, and my house sits in a 100 year flood zone.  That means that the area in question floods about every 100 years.  The last major flood, that didn't affect my house was in 2021 (a year before I moved) and the last record breaking flood was in 1990, before my house was even built.  The river, Skagit River, has had a dike system for a long, long time, which has been very affective at holding the river back.  

Last week they were predicting the river to get to 42 feet deep. Action stage is 23 feet, minor stage is 28, moderate is 30 and major starts at 32 feet.  Last week I was under the impression that the dikes only held up to 37 feet, so I was a little freaked out. Especially since everyone was saying that once the dikes are breached, they are more likely to completely fail.  The river was supposed to crest at 4am on Friday morning. 

They sent out emergency alerts, culminating in Wednesday a "get out now" alert.  However, I knew that the worst wasn't supposed to happen until early Friday morning, so we decided to stay.  Plus, our house is built with the main floor on the second floor.  The downstairs was originally a large garage, but someone had renovated it to be half living space.  Which is where Damian and Asher live.

Thursday they lowered the peak of the river to 38 feet (better than 42) and that evening Damian went down to the boat launch and saw some "official" looking workers there.  So he asked them what they thought and they told them the dikes hold up to 40 feet and since they had lowered the peak to 38 we should be fine.  I was a lot less worried then and went to bed safe in the knowledge that the river would be held back. 

4am Friday morning, Chris is yelling at me to get up.  Apparently National Guard had come to the door and told him that the house was flooding and if we wanted to get out, we needed to now.  At that time, the water was up to their shins.  By the time I was awake enough to figure out what was happening and had changed and grabbed my bag (yes, we packed for just in case) and was taking it to my car, the water was higher.  I moved my car and started yelling at Chris and Damian to move theirs as they are much smaller than mine, and I can't afford to buy new cars. We got them all up the driveway a little, so they were out of the water and I kept wading back and forth taking things to the car . . . I forgot to mention, I was barefoot.  My feet were frozen, and I was walking on gravel.  It hurt.

By the time we all got in our cars, the water was above my knees.  We went, parade style, through town and I messaged my sister and her husband saying we were on our way.  Yes, I had talked to my sister prior, yes, she was aware it was a possibility.

This was my panic first picture

The dog park under water

As we were leaving, Maddox snapped a picture.

I wish I had taken a picture inside.  I was helping Damian grab stuff in his area, and the water was bubbling in.  It was definitely surreal.  When we left, the water was inches deep inside, the water got up to about a foot deep inside according to water marks when we got back.  

I was glued to facebook and the news all day Friday.  I wanted to see how bad it was.  I actually wish we had stayed, we could have saved more of Damian's stuff and I could have seen how bad it got.  We definitely needed to move our cars, but we could have parked them at the dog park.  Of course at the time we didn't know how deep it would get, and it did get to the street, but it didn't get deep that far up the driveway.  

I got a message from our neighbor at about 2pm showing that the waters had already receded a lot. 

Damian and I wanted to go home to check it out, so we went up and found that the water inside was mostly gone.  We set up some fans and left.  We ended up going home on Saturday and spent the rest of the weekend emptying out Damian's area.  I'm rather scared of the garage, that has a lot more stuff and we haven't even touched it yet.  The power is mostly not working downstairs and we're not sure what happened.  There were a lot of extension cords plugged in, I tried to get as many as I could unplugged and up, but I know I missed a few, and didn't even think about unplugging things in the garage.  I don't know if my treadmill works, I know the fridge and freezer keep turning off the GFCI outlet they are plugged into.  

Here's a few of the pictures I took of the inside after the water went down.

And the stuff we drug out of the house and had to figure out what to do with.

Poor Damian is stuck sleeping upstairs for now.

Turns out that the river didn't flood us. It was the slough (pronounced slew) that is right behind our house.  Almost everyone that lives along the slough was underwater, some worse than others.  We were not nearly as bad as some.  I have a coworker whose parents live in a completely different area that lost everything.  

These are some pictures from the news of my neighborhood.  This area is a few blocks away, I run by it all the time.  There is actually a road there in between the two houses, it's underwater. The press pretty much set up camp on the road that is not underwater.  There were so many reports from that area on Friday.  They also did a follow up on the family that lives in that house with the giant skeleton.  On Friday they had a 10 day old baby (well, they still have the baby, it's just not 10 days old anymore).  The water got up to 3 feet inside their house.

This is looking right at the slough, it has to be after the water was already going down.  Our house is not very far beyond those trees in the background.

I wrote this paragraph a week or more ago and never finished the post. I decided to include it, just to finish up the saga of the move with my sisters.  

My sisters finally swapped houses.  What a crazy ride that was!  It is very sad though, with the way my oldest sister is (and her boyfriend) I will never step foot on my parent's property again.  I did make (sorta) peace with it, and went over there at the end of summer to say goodbye.  I will say that I think emptying a house and then selling it, is way better than this crap that we've been going through for 4 years.  Even though it would be strangers living in the house, at least I could pretend that it was taken care of.  I cannot even pretend that my childhood home won't become a hoarders house, because it already is.