The record flood of Feb. 8 and 9, 1996, began 15 years ago today, as the heavens settled into a pounding deluge and Southwest Washington residents started on a ride that made the old whopping floods of January 1990 fade into memory.
By the time the sun began shining again on Friday, Feb. 9, Interstate 5 had been covered with as much as ten feet of water and most of the Twin Cities resembled a lake.
At the Mellen Street river gauge in Centralia, the water topped out at more than nine feet above flood stage that morning. Other rivers hit similar high levels.
The flood was a wild ride. This is how it happened.
Thursday: Taking Shelter
It was clear by the morning of Thursday, Feb. 8, that this would be a major flood, but the next two days would exceed all expectations.
Many people awoke in the Twin Cities to find streets that were already impassable. The Chronicle ran a banner headline with the words, “We’re swamped.”
Tower Avenue was closed most of Thursday after China Creek broke loose from its banks and began setting a course down Maple Street. The flooding also created a large sinkhole near Tower’s intersection with Maple Street. Landslides blocked both lanes of Kresky Road northbound, cutting off all road travel between Centralia and Chehalis.
Three men near Adna trying to herd 26 head of cattle to high ground Thursday afternoon ended up trapped by floodwaters after being carried away by the current. The Lewis County Sheriff’s Office brought a 10-foot-long boat on top of a fire district pumper truck to try to rescue the men from a rocky outcropping a stone’s throw from Ceres Hill Road. Dave Frazier waded up into the current and floated to safety. The other two were quickly rescued — and noted that the cattle all made it to safety.
The floodwaters rose quickly at the Chehalis Avenue Apartments. Robert “Corky” Crosby tried to load up his family’s belongings into a delivery truck, as he had in a smaller flood the previous November, but the vehicle became stalled in the high water. He came back with a cable attached to another vehicle to tow it out, but by then the water was five feet deep. He began swimming for the delivery truck through murky water flowing from the Superfund toxic cleanup site across the street.
At one point, he felt a rat on his shoulder.
He got the truck free, but all of their possessions were dunked in water that filled their low-income apartment five feet deep.
By early afternoon, the Skookumchuck Dam, about 15 miles upstream from Bucoda, was spilling a record 7,849 cubic feet of water per second.
Water takes 12 hours to travel from the dam to Centralia, so at 4 p.m. city officials began asking residents of the Logan District on the north end of Centralia to evacuate. Barely an hour after that warning, at about 5:30 p.m., the Skookumchuck River topped the dike just north of Prospect Avenue at the Union Pacific Railroad grade.
At 11 p.m., the Skookumchuck River crested at 87.3 feet, 2.3 feet above flood stage and 0.2 feet above the previous record flood of January 1990.
Throughout the local area, drivers who decided to brave the high water stalled out. In Centralia, a fire truck became swamped Thursday night in what is normally a placid China Creek. Firefighters spent their time evacuating residents, securing floating propane tanks and checking underground fuel leaks.
KELA radio, next door to the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds, stopped broadcasting Thursday night when the waters became too high. The only broadcast source of information about road closures, evacuations and emergency shelters through the worst of the flood was KITI radio, which kept broadcasting even when its disc jockeys’ feet were soaked in about an inch of water.
Hundreds of people took refuge in emergency shelters. Facilities were opened to flood victims at Centralia Middle School, Edison Elementary School, R.E. Bennett Elementary School, the Randle Fire Department, Adna High School, the Grand Mound Baptist Church, and at a downtown Bucoda church. Thursday night, before the floodwater had peaked, there were at least 600 people in Centralia shelters and another 100 at R.E. Bennett in Chehalis. Thirty residents of a south Chehalis trailer park also took shelter in the Lewis County Jail after space and bedding dwindled at Red Cross shelters.
An estimated 600 people in Bucoda were forced to flee their homes. Many took shelter at a Bucoda church and at the city’s historic Odd Fellows Hall. At the height of the flood, water two feet deep was flowing swiftly down Market Street, which became a main channel for the overflowing Skookumchuck River.
The flood renewed concerns about how easily Providence Centralia Hospital can become isolated from the rest of the community. Helicopters were used to shuttle doctors and other workers to the hospital after flooding on Mellen Street blocked the only direct route. An indirect route via Cooks Hill was later cut off when the Galvin Road Bridge was closed. National Guard trucks were also used to shuttle personnel and some patients to the hospital.
Dr. Pat O’Neill was in the Providence emergency room during the flood. He didn’t recognize the extent of the disaster until he went outside and saw a truck unloading evacuees.
“The first image I had was of Bosnia,” O’Neill said of the war-torn region.
Some residents posted signs for drivers, urging them to drive slowly. Those who didn’t pushed a wave of water that entered some homes that had barely escaped the rising waters.
Other people went out of their way to help. Bryan Chapman, 13, and Andy Hillstrom, 12, used their day off from school to carry sandbags in wheelbarrows through downtown Centralia. Hillstrom’s mother had encouraged him to help an elderly woman protect her home.
Other young people became entrepreneurs, beachcombers among the flotsam.
Stephan Haskins, 11, and Nick Treat, 9, pulled a wagon around the Edison District picking up firewood to sell.
A group of 80 school children from Tacoma were stranded at the Cispus Learning Center south of Randle. A concrete bridge across the Cispus River on Forest Road 28 buckled sometime Thursday night. The alternate route was washed out. The children had been scheduled to go home Friday morning. On Saturday, after the waters had gone down, authorities determined that the bridge was still safe for foot traffic. The children were shuttled to the bridge in a convoy of local vans and sport utility vehicles, then walked across and were taken home in school buses.
Friday: A Water World
The Chehalis River, which takes the longest to crest, finally peaked at 3:30 a.m. Friday, Feb. 9, at 74.3 feet, more than nine feet above flood stage and a foot higher than the January 1990 flood.
In east Lewis County, the Cowlitz River crested at 24.2 feet in Randle, more than six feet above flood stage.
The sun that morning came out on a lake where Centralia and Chehalis used to be.
“This is the first time I can remember that every river in Lewis County not only flooded, but set new records in the same flood event,” said then-Lewis County Public Services Director Bob Berg, who is now Centralia’s police chief.
The flood had covered parts of Interstate 5, from Kmart north toward Centralia, as high as 10 feet deep in some places.
The interstate was also blocked near Woodland, 25 miles north of Portland, when a landslide 175 feet wide, 200 feet long and as deep as five feet in some places blocked all six lanes.
Rail traffic came to a halt after a series of calamities up and down the Washington rail corridor, including a mudslide near Steilacoom that slammed into a freight train, derailing three cars.
The Chehalis-Centralia Airport was flooded when the rivers overflowed a dike protecting the site.
The raging Skookumchuck had turned a railroad crossing north of the Edison District into a tangle of twisted metal and broken wood.
Some roads and parking lots rippled under the pressure. The AM-PM mini-mart on Harrison Avenue had an asphalt wave where there had been a smooth parking lot a few days before.
Garbage littered the streets after the flood. Bare Christmas trees, bedding foam, tires, railroad ties and plastic foam cups were strewn up and down many roads, which had essentially turned into dry stream beds.
Saturday and Beyond: Surveying the Damage and Beginning the Recovery
By Saturday, Feb. 10, residents and business owners were surveying the damage. Businesses along the “Miracle Mile” were hardest hit.
Some businesses, such as Shop ‘n Kart, were assisted by volunteers who showed up to help clean up the damage. Darris McDaniel, president and owner of the grocery store, said about 70 percent of the about 100 people who came to help clean up were volunteers.
“They’re doing it out of appreciation of the manner they’re treated at the store,” he said as the impromptu crew began cleaning up an estimated $400,000 worth of water-damaged inventory.
The floors and carpets in many homes were covered by a thick layer of mud. Some people who had put their furniture and belongings up well off their floors returned home to find that the water rose higher than expected, ruining their possessions.
At the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds, the water was 18 inches higher than in the January 1990 flood. Water also made it into the nearby senior citizens center, which had stayed dry in the 1990 flood.
County workers used a backhoe to dig a hole in the fairgrounds dike to let the high water back into Salzer Creek. Pumping out the water takes too much time, said then-fair manager Earl Spencer, and time was of the essence in saving fairground buildings.
At Uhlmann Motors near Interstate 5 in north Chehalis, water deluged more than 100 vehicles. Employees rowing around on Saturday, well after the rivers had crested, occasionally struck the roofs of new cars with their oars.
“We prepared for a 36-inch flood and we got a five-foot flood,” then-Uhlmann general manager George Godding said.
Terry Miller, general manager of the recreational vehicle center, said he lost 82 of the big rigs and trailers. Floodwaters pushed the RVs around as if they were children’s toys.
The Sunbird Shopping Center sustained perhaps the worst damage, with eight feet of water inside the building. Workers there had erected a makeshift dike to protect the store, but it failed Thursday as a convoy of five National Guard Humvees motored north along National Avenue. Some people blamed a wake from the military vehicles for causing the dike to fail, although others said it would have failed anyway.
Wal-Mart had no water in its store, and had to deal only with a muddy parking lot. Kmart reported a couple of inches of water within its doors, but after several days of squeezing, the store was dry with minimal damage.
Across the freeway, the industrial businesses were not so lucky.
Debbie Dean, manager of Interstate Steel, said some of its heavier equipment sank in the flood water and many other items simply floated away, because the water was higher than the business’s fence.
By Monday, a temporary Red Cross office in downtown Chehalis was so swamped that it had to set up limits on how many people it would help at once. Trained Red Cross workers came from as far away as Tennessee, Florida and New York to ease the pressure on local employees and volunteers.
A giant pump on loan from the electricity company PacifiCorp (which operated the Centralia Steam-Electric Plant at the time) was being used to pump water from the Logan District in north Centralia to a ditch emptying into an unused mill pond. The area had been flooded when the Skookumchuck River overtopped a dike. With the river receding, the neighborhood was like a giant basin. After the flood of 1990, the area had held water for five to six weeks.
By the Wednesday following the floods, President Bill Clinton came to the Northwest to view the damage. Marine One, the presidential helicopter, touched down at Woodland High School, north of Portland. Clinton promised money to help rebuild.
“We will do what we can to help you put it behind you,” Clinton said. “There’s nothing even the president can say that will make these losses go away.”
