With winter rains now in full effect and more wet weather forecasted daily throughout the end of the year, construction crews were hard at work on Tuesday, Dec. 16, rebuilding the bank of the Cowlitz River in Packwood’s High Valley neighborhoods.
The river bank suffered significant erosion during last week’s flooding event, which saw the river come close to breaking flooding records — with the river level gauge in Packwood showing the river rise from 3.96 feet deep on Dec. 8 to 12.24 feet on Dec. 10.
As of 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 17, the water level had receded to 5.84 feet.
While no homes were lost during the flooding, some suffered damage to their foundations.
The Chronicle talked with Pelland Enterprises LLC manager Greg Pelland, who was overseeing one of the construction crews in High Valley on Tuesday as they hurriedly worked to rebuild the river bank.
Although Pelland Enterprises is headquartered in Puyallup, Pelland owns property in Packwood. Like many other communities up north, Puyallup also got hit by flooding.
“I haven’t seen it. I haven’t been there in the daylight,” Pelland said. “I’ve been here since last week.”
He added he knows some of the High Valley residents whose properties Pelland Enterprises was doing river bank repair work on.
While Tuesday’s storm didn’t bring any new flooding, high winds did knock out the power for approximately 16,000 county residents at its peak, according to the Lewis County Public Utilities District outage map. Outages were being reported in virtually every rural county community, including Packwood.
Precipitation is expected to continue throughout the week, according to the National Weather Service, which still has a flood watch issued for Packwood.
Additionally, a flood warning has been issued for the neighboring East Lewis County community of Randle effective through Friday night with both rain and possible snow forecasted to fall.
Cowlitz River flood gauge data can be found on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website for Packwood at https://water.noaa.gov/gauges/PACW1 and for Randle at https://water.noaa.gov/gauges/RAWW1.
