US Weather Bureau is predicting 2-5 inches of rain for here Saturday night. That should be fun. (Also 5-8 inches in the Coast range.)

Where that won't be fun is if the Willamette goes out of its banks. It won't affect us here, but the creek ought to get pretty lively!

UPDATE: I wonder if this will be as bad as the Chrismas Flood? Probably not, but it may come close.

UPDATE: I was only 10 when the Christmas Flood happened, but it's got special meaning to me. It was the second part of a 1-2 punch to hit the Northwest, coming just about a year after what we call the Columbus Day Storm.

About 1961, my parents bought a lot in SW Portland, moved a trailer house onto it, and began building their dream house. Now when a lot of people say "We're building a house" they mean they hired a construction company. That's not what we did. My dad actually designed the place and drew all the blueprints, and worked on it evenings and weekends and vacations. My grandfather, who was a carpenter, came up to help as much as he could, and friends of my dad would sometimes come over and help. My brother, who was 12-13 years old at the time, did a lot of work and me, 8-9, I did as much as I could. We had the foundation poured and the basement covered by the main floor, and managed to put up all the outer walls and got the roof over it, and covered the whole roof with plywood. But there weren't yet any internal partitions by October, 1962.

And then we got the storm of the century, and it blew the house down. I was in the bathroom when it happened so I didn't see it go. But shortly thereafter my folks began to worry that the trailer might roll over in the wind, and so we walked to our neighbor's house and asked them to put us up for the night.

We spent a week living at my uncle's house in NE Portland because his electricity didn't go out. It took us several months to tear everything apart and restack all the lumber, and then to put the walls and roof back up again.

We were a lot further along by a year later when the second punch of the 1-2 whammy happened. It was bad for the state, but it didn't actually affect us at all. (Our lot was on the edge of the Tryon Creek Valley, so the water just ran off and we never saw anything.

But I remember in 1964 people beginning to wonder if we'd get slammed again. (We didn't.) By then we were living in the house and had sold the trailer.

UPDATE: Oh, boy; they've updated the forecast:

LATEST FORECASTS FOR FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH MONDAY AFTERNOON BRING 8 TO 12 INCHES OF RAIN TO THE CASCADES AND FOOTHILLS...7 TO 11 INCHES FOR THE COAST RANGE...5 TO 7 INCHES ALONG THE IMMEDIATE COAST...AND 3 TO 4 INCHES ALONG THE I-5 CORRIDOR.

That last is me.

And if those estimates are even close to accurate, every river in the western third of this state is going to flood.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 12:34 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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