A year's worth of wicked weather

It started with landslides. Then came the windstorms. Then floods, then more wind, then snow. Then the master-blaster windstorm in December, just to finish off a year the weather folks won't soon forget.

"It's been a while since we had anything like this," said Ted Buehner of the National Weather Service's Seattle office.

The nearest relative of this tantrum-thrower of a year was 1997, which started with a thaw and mudslides, moved on to windstorms, and along the way cranked up 14 tornadoes around the state — yes, we have tornadoes here.

In all, 23 people in the state were killed that year by weather. This year, there were eight deaths related directly to weather in Western Washington, the most since 1997. And that doesn't count the seven people who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, the one who died in a fire and the one who was electrocuted after this month's windstorm, which cut power to more than a million homes and businesses.

To appreciate the roller-coaster ride 2006 offered, consider that one of the most gloriously sunny and dry summers ever was sandwiched between one of the wettest Januarys — Seattle recorded nearly a month straight of rain — and a fall that was pummeled by wind, floods and snow.

It was the year of the power outage, with windstorms dousing the lights in February, November and again in December. But it was also a year of the heat wave (in June and July) and of hail (in March and April), tornadoes (January and June) and funnel clouds (October).

2006 weather by the numbers


8

Number of deaths in state blamed directly on the weather

15.63

Inches of rainfall in November, Seattle's wettest month on record.

18

Temperatures on Nov. 28 and 29, the coldest days of the year

97

The temperature July 21, the warmest day of the year

1 million-plus

Number of Puget Sound-area homes and businesses in the dark after December's windstorm

November '06 stands out for pure drama. Buckets of rain pumped up rivers to all-time flood levels; a windstorm knocked out power for 120,000 customers, and a snowstorm topped it all off. Snow fell during a Seahawks game, and rush hour bit down hard, making for epic traffic jams.

That trifecta of rain, wind and snow was a doozy. "To have all three of our winter-season hazardous events happen in one month, that's quite unusual," Buehner said.

November was a killer month for salmon. Redds, or nests, packed with eggs were destroyed by floods in Western Washington rivers. Puget Sound chinook were particularly hard hit.

Of course, heavy November rains have been around as long as the fish. But never has there been so much pavement, so many miles of dikes, so many straightened riverbanks, so much development. All of it means more devastating runoff.

A little later in the year, the baby fish would have hatched and could have sought safer water. Biologists won't know for four years what the real death toll from the flooding is. The region has put buckets of money into recovering wild Puget Sound chinook, but they remain at risk of extinction.

If it's any consolation, the new year is expected to bring an end to the wild weather, predicts Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

You can thank an El Niño weather system that typically builds in January for the warmer, calmer, drier weather.

"Go skiing now, before it's ruined," Mass advises.

Looking back, Mass has no explanation for the year's tumult. It's not global warming, he says. While that's linked to more powerful hurricanes, it hasn't been correlated with storms in our latitudes.

"I can't tell you why we had much bigger storms than the year before; there may not even be a why," he said.

"We were in kind of a dead period there for the last couple of years. But not this year."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com