Thurston and Lewis Counties surrounding us were buried under water and muck on the afternoon of December 4th. (We live in Thurston County, so that says how lucky we are that our little piece wasn't drowning, but still, it made us somber to see our neighbors' properties get washed away.) A huge rainstorm just overwhelmed the Chehalis River.
Jaime and I drove just a few minutes south of us on parts of I-5 that were still running and this is what we saw.
Families lost EVERYTHING because the water was contaminated with sewage, so anything that couldn't be sterilized had to be thrown away, even if it was normally waterproof. The Chehalis fire station was the gathering place where volunteers picked up rubber gloves to wear under leather ones for added protection. The red cross even had a table for tetanus shots to anyone who needed them. The flood-waters filled the homes 9 feet up the wall! That means even pictures above our heads on the walls were ruined and what was left behind was about 4 feet of slimy muck that had to be shoveled out. (Personally, I would have just set fire to the building and walked away, to start completely over. But as the victims would have it, they wanted to salvage as much as possible...a very hard position to be in for them.)
We drove past a few areas where there were cows standing in what used to be a fenced-in pasture. Only now there were no fences--luckily the cows didn't know about the fences yet and were still standing there. There were chunks of road with the painted yellow dashed lines still visible floating around the cows' feet.
Millions of dollars of damage in less than an hour...(groan)
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