Beware the Pineapple

All that northwest Christmas snow is now melting with a vengeance, flooding freeways and isolating the citizenry, including my sister, Mary. She lives outside Olympia near the town of Yelm with her roommate, plus Judy the dog. Below is Mary's sodden dispatch:

"Today Vail Road was closed south of my place where it goes over the Deschutes River and in the other direction up by the turn off into Yelm along Black Hills Road. I had over 4" of rain at my house yesterday! The winds are fierce but we're not even close to getting the worst of it. There are talking heads on the TV saying worst flooding EVER.

I had my first recording session for BirdNote yesterday in Seattle and I was going to stay in town and drop a disc off at McCann's and have dinner with Annie and Paul Soustek but I bolted for the south as soon as I finished the session and it was akin to fleeing Sodom. I did not look back but I heard roads were closing behind me as I monitored the radio. I had to drive the diciest section of I-5 (in the urban area) by Tacoma. They ended up evacuating 7,000 people from the area beside that spot by the time I got to Yelm. They also closed a 20 mile section of I-5 that you had driven through Chehalis/Centralia area, just south of where the alpaca farm is that you passed on the way back to Glendale. They had had terrible flooding just south of there last year. For awhile there was no way to go by road or rail from Seattle to Portland. The back roads were closed or flooded too. Seattle's kind of cut off since all the passes through the Cascades are closed or impassable, closed from snow or avalanche danger. I'm not sure how that rehab is going but I'll get the scoop on the 5:00 news coming up in an hour or so.

A good thing they learned from the devastation last year in these rural spots was to design an emergency plan for evacuation of critters. Last year they lost a dreadful amount of horses and cattle, sheep, goats and alpacas. Pierce County had a plan in place and the critters are fine as they evacuated about 22,000 people out that a way and who knows how many cloven hoofs.

I went to the store, bought 30 lbs of food for [dog] Judy and the fixins for a huge pot of Irish Stew for me and I'm fixing on fixing that up tonight to take me through the weekend. I will not be in a fix unless I lose power before the crock pot is finished. Then I use the burner on my BBQ grill."

Here's a site with road updates and live traffic cams that show dark, empty, watery interstates.