West Coast hit by ANOTHER storm leaving 200K homes without power as rest of US reels from 'bomb cyclone'
PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON: While the rest of the US is still recovering from the 'bomb cyclone', a new storm has hit the West Coast, leaving 200,000 homes without power. Drivers were stranded on flooded roads, trees were uprooted from their roots and winds gusted to above 100 mph when the storm hit the West Coast.
In the Pacific Northwest, hundreds of thousands of residents were without power on December 27. That number had dropped to 52,521 in Oregon and 17,453 in Washington. Between 4 pm and 10 pm, residents of Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington, should have access to power again. Most dreadful of all, a new high tide record was broken when it reached 18.4 feet on the morning of December 27, breaking the previous mark of 17.99 feet established in 1987. Up until around 10 am, when the tide started to recede, the town experienced severe flooding, forcing eateries to close for breakfast and compelling locals to drive through water up to their tires. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen in 35 years,” BJ Clausen who works at Capital City Yachts told King 5. “I wish I would have brought my boots this morning,” Clausen reported that his office had four inches of standing water when he got there for work.
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Pam Oates, a local entrepreneur and co-owner of Budd Bay Cafe, claimed the spike "caught her off guard." The restaurant flooded for the first time ever and her team had to utilize a shop vacuum to remove all the water in time for lunch and dinner. “We're resilient,” Oates told King 5. Lena Drath, an Olympia resident, made a startling find close to Puget Sound when she saw a jellyfish impaled in a large puddle. Lena can be seen grabbing the jellyfish and rushing off to throw it back into the Budd Inlet in a video that was posted to Twitter.
“Aw, it's stuck,” she can be heard saying on the video as she pulls it out. Flooding also occurred in certain Seattle neighborhoods and the areas surrounding Puget Sound. Flash flood warnings have been issued for December 30 and 31 for Northeast California, Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada, as well as coastal flooding and high wind advisories for Western Washington.
The National Weather Service in Reno also observed strong wind gusts, reporting that Heavenly Summit, Mt Rose Ski and Mammoth Mountain all had wind gusts between 108 and 111 mph. In contrast, gusts of 51 to 56 mph were recorded in Carson City, South Lake Tahoe and Northwest Reno. According to KOIN, floods on December 27 caused the closure of many routes in Portland. Similar statistics were observed in California where there were 60 collisions on freeways during rush hour.
Mount Tamalpais State Park which is close to San Francisco received 4.1 inches of rain before 6 am, according to CBS. A second storm that is also moving toward the West Coast is anticipated to strike the Pacific Northwest on December 29 and deliver more torrential rain. In addition to mudslides and landslides, the second storm may dump several feet of snow in certain regions.