MONTESANO, Wash. - Wynoochee Valley mushroom farmer Diane Pinger was startled out of a sound sleep last Tuesday night by a loud banging at her door and a local fireman calling out that the Wynoochee Dam was full and that she had only an hour to evacuate.
"It really scared me," she said, explaining that her husband Mike was at a friend's house - ironically enough, helping him get his motorcycle ready for the summer. "You think you know what you'll take if you have to evacuate, but when it actually happens, you stand there feeling overwhelmed."
Mike rushed home, and they were fortunate enough to be able to get Diane's horse and their daughter's hedgehog and other assorted pets to safety. But when they returned the next day, the water between the road and their house was three feet deep. Worse yet, the sterile lab, where they store the blocks treated with Shiitake inoculum, was flooded with about 1 1/2 feet of water.
"It was devastating," said Mike. "We lost 246 blocks, worth about $14,000 to $16,000 in business. Everything has to be stripped out and dried out. And the lab has to be made sterile again."
Fortunately, their greenhouse, where the mature mushrooms are harvested, stayed clear of water. But that next day they had to resort to canoe-power to get back and forth from the house to the greenhouse in order to harvest them. In two months, though, the loss of those 246 blocks where the mushrooms were started will put a "time dent" in their harvests.
The Pingers live about 1,000 feet away from the Wynoochee River and several miles up the Wynoochee River Road - about 10 miles east of Aberdeen. As they crossed the bridge near their house, they could see trees and roots hurtling full force down the river. The water, which is usually far below the bridge, was right up to the bottom of the bridge.
"That really surprised us," said Mike. "We hadn't expected that." The flooding also surprised weather forecasters, dam hydrologists, and oldtimers alike. According to statistics from the Army Corps of Engineers, rainfall at the dam from 3 a.m., March 18, to 3 a.m., March 19 - a 24-hour period of time - was 11.6 inches. A 100-year flood for that area in that amount of time would be only 10.6 inches.
"They got nailed," said Marian Valentine, a Corps hydraulics engineer who was regulating the flow for part of the time. "The forecast was only about 6 inches. Instead, they got a 100-year event."
To the west in the Satsop Valley, Stormy Glick, whose farm lies at the confluence of the east and middle forks of the Satsop River, also had record floodwaters roar through his place. Damages to his 240-acre farm include livestock losses, about 10,000 feet of fencing ripped out, 90 acres of newly seeded oats and hay washed away, huge trees uprooted, and about 5 acres of land swept away.
"We heard the cows bawling out toward where there was nothing but water," he said, referring to the evening of March 18, when the river was rising higher and higher. "We don't know what happened to them. We just don't know."
So far he found one that perished and 44 of his original herd of 50. But because he has no way to hold them in, they're roaming the area, although they do come to the barn, which fortunately stayed high and dry, to be fed. He said it's going to take a lot of work -and money - to get his farm back into shape. His fields are full of trees, limbs, gravel, silt and about 300 large bags of garbage that somehow ended up there.
"I told my farmhand that he can expect 30 days of work just cleaning it up," he said.
In the 300-foot buffer along the river, where logging is prohibited, the huge old maples, cottonwoods and alder were torn out and washed downstream, along with two to five acres of land.
"It's all gone," said Glick. "Even the ground. It's all completely gone." Just to the west in Brady Bottoms, where the Satsop runs into the Chehalis River, a miracle of sorts occurred. Chris Eden, co-owner of Satsop Bulb Farm, said that a mere 12 hours after their fields were inundated with about 15 inches of fast-flowing muddy water, daffodil pickers were able to get back to work, although it's still a mucky, muddy mess. That's especially good news since the flood hit right at the peak of the farm's picking season. She thinks that the water drained off fast and caused so little damage because her rows were planted north to south - in the same direction the water washed up over the road and roared across her fields. At its height, she said, the water was as high as the flowers, and the tops of the colorful, happy-looking daffodils bobbing about in all that brown water was a strange sight indeed. Yet except for in specific spots of the farm, the flowers are just fine for picking since the flowing water washed off any mud that might have accumulated on them.
Some livestock owners, meanwhile, have run into a major problem. Grays Harbor County Emergency Management official Darlena Wilson said she's been contacted by farmers desperate for hay.
"It's a real crisis situation," she said. "The animals are at risk. Some of the cattle couldn't get out of the water and were marooned on islands. They're cold and wet and hungry. Some are going to die."
She's urging anyone who has hay to donate or to offer at very low prices to contact her at 360-249-3911. She pointed out that many of the people who need the hay have lost their homes and almost everything they own to the flood.
Her co-worker Ed McGowan said it's still too early to assess the agricultural damages caused by the floods. But as of Monday afternoon, 104 citizens had called in to report about $3.5 million in damages. "There's a lot of agricultural land along these rivers," he said, "so I expect there will be a lot of farm-related damages reported."
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