00:00Our basement's completely flooded. There's a room at the back of our carport that's flooded.
00:04Our shop's flooded. Our outbuildings are flooded.
00:10You're seeing video of the devastating flooding in western Washington.
00:14Residents are now speaking out after historic flooding continues to devastate the Pacific Northwest from multiple atmospheric rivers.
00:21The governor of Washington has declared a statewide emergency and mandatory evacuations have been ordered in several communities.
00:27Local first responders reporting dozens of water rescues.
00:32I know they've still been ongoing throughout the afternoon today.
00:35Some of the areas up the hills, up into the mountains, I've seen the rapid crest of the rivers, and they're on their way back down.
00:40But if you get a little farther downstream, closer to sea level, that's where we're still seeing the rivers rise.
00:46It's concerning that the worst is yet to come in these communities when we're already seeing so many videos like this.
00:52I mean, look at that house and how high the water is.
00:54Yeah, many, many homes here in the water, unfortunately.
00:57And we're going to continue to track this.
00:59Some areas seeing record flooding for, look at this whole area.
01:03The river has swollen from, it's filming basically the entire camera there, only masked by some trees and homes poking above.
01:10Yeah, it gives you the idea, one, why there's mandatory evacuations for whole communities,
01:14but also why this was not just your typical atmospheric river that caused this.
01:19Yeah, this has been a very persistent, firmly directed atmospheric river event that had multiple thousands of miles,
01:272,000 or 3,000 mile fetch across the Pacific that's been directing that moisture in.
01:31Now it's a shell of its former self, some lingering rain, but the rainfall rates have really dropped off.
01:37Yeah, it's really wrapping up, which is the good news.
01:39The rivers just take some time for them to crest after the rainfall ends.
01:42The prolonged nature of some of the flood crests last over a day and major flooding and even near record flooding for a day or longer in some sections.
01:52Some of these homes are in water for multiple days.
01:55When we take a look at the reason for all this and how we got here, basically, we had over a foot of rain in some areas,
02:02almost a foot and a half in Quinault in western Washington over the past five days near Mount Olympus, 14.44 inches of rain paradise, 14.15 inches.
02:12Beautiful places, but when we get rain like this here, it's just devastating.
02:16I wanted to look at some of these river gauges.
02:18So here we are, you can see we went from Action Stage, this is for the Snohomish River in the community of Snohomish.
02:24Action Stage is when people would look at the water and say, hey, this is really, really high,
02:28but not quite out of its banks to the point that it's impacting traffic on roads or that sort of thing.
02:33Minor flooding, parkland, underwater, moderate flooding are beginning to impact structures and properties,
02:39and major flooding when homes and businesses are inundated in water.
02:43Look at this.
02:44The record flood crest formerly in Snohomish was 33.5 feet.
02:49We're at 33.99 right now, so we have broken a record there.
02:51And unfortunately, we're going to hover at and above the previous record stage through tomorrow morning.
02:58And then it'll rapidly improve in that area.
03:01The Snohomish River in Monroe, farther downstream, still rising deep into major flooding right now.
03:08Here's the record 25.3.
03:10We're going to crest most likely at 27.3.
03:14So we're going to break that record by two feet, putting many in severe danger.
03:19And here's a quick look at the Skagit River near Mount Vernon.
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