Washington infrastructure begins to fail as atmospheric rivers continue pummeling the state

Several levees have failed, more than a dozen highways are closed and one person has died in Washington state as atmospheric river storms continue to batter the region and strain its infrastructure.

The state’s dams and levees largely withstood last week’s first wave of storms, but rain continued to fall, so some began to become overwhelmed.

At the same time, a patchwork of low-lying areas in Western Washington remains filled with slowly receding floodwaters.

Gov. Bob Ferguson said in a news conference Tuesday that there have been more than 1,200 rescues in 10 counties since Dec. 8. Thirteen state highways are still closed and one of the Cascade Mountains’ main arteries, Highway 2, could remain closed for months. The largest artery – Interstate 90, which runs through the state – was also closed due to large mudslides.

“Our infrastructure has been compromised,” Ferguson said. “There is enormous pressure on this infrastructure.”

A 33-year-old man died Tuesday morning in Snohomish County, north of Seattle, after driving into a ditch along a flooded farm road in a rural area.

“We believe this is the first death from these storms,” Ferguson said, adding that it was a small miracle that there were not more deaths.

Courtney O’Keefe, communications director for the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, said the man’s vehicle, a Chevrolet Tahoe, drove past roadblocks and the victim called a friend when his car became submerged in floodwaters. This friend called 911.

“There’s a ditch going down the side of the road. With the floodwaters, it would be hard to tell where the ditch ends and the road begins,” O’Keefe said, adding that the death was still under investigation.

Over the past two days, two levees have been breached in suburban Seattle.

The most recent, Tuesday morning, occurred in the town of Pacific, near White River.

“Around 12:30 last night, a leak was discovered the size of a fire hose,” said Sheri Badger, public information officer for the King County Office of Emergency Management. “It then expanded to about 120 feet long.”

The semi-permanent seawall was built with HESCO barriers, a tool made of wire mesh and fabric filled with sand, soil or gravel. The barriers were stacked on top of each other, Badger said, and water was leaking through the gaps between them.

The county sent an evacuation alert to 1,300 people in the area. Crews worked to add sandbags and “super bags” – large nylon sandbags – to reinforce the broken sections.

On Monday, a 6-foot section of another levee washed away in the town of Tukwila, south of Seattle, along the Green River. King County sent evacuation alerts to about 1,100 people, but workers quickly filled the destroyed area, limiting the damage.

The dike was damaged during flooding about four years ago and has not yet been fully repaired.

At least two dams are being monitored for cracks and potential failures, according to the state Department of Ecology. One of them, Sylvia Lake Dam, was listed as being in “poor condition” with “significant” risk after its last inspection in November 2024, according to the National Dam Inventory. It was built in 1918.

Andrew Wineke, a department spokesman, said several roads would be at risk if the dam burst, but no homes or people would be directly affected.

Much of western Washington is covered by rivers that descend steeply from the Cascade Mountains. These streams – which flow toward Puget Sound – once formed winding, braided tangles along wide floodplains. But for more than a century, people began building and straightening large numbers of dams for drinking water, flood control, and hydropower. Streams became channeled rivers – highways for running water.

Since then, people have fortified levee systems to contain water, often building housing and industrial buildings as close to the edge as floodplain planners allow.

Some areas that were hit hard by flooding have already been flooded and will be flooded again.

Atmospheric rivers, like recent storm systems, can look like fire hoses from the tropics on weather radar systems.

Such storms are nicknamed “Pineapple Expresses” because they sometimes draw moisture and heat from Pacific waters near Hawaii and other tropical regions.

The Pacific Northwest can usually handle one or two such storms without much trouble, but it has seen three major bouts of intense rain since December 8. Parts of the North and Central Cascades – the steepest and most rugged mountains in the continental United States – received up to 16 inches of rain over three days.

“The river atmospheric events were significant but not historic,” said state climatologist Guillaume Mauger. “What’s remarkable is that they were back to back.”

He added that more intense river flooding is expected in the future as rising temperatures mean more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow. A warmer atmosphere also causes more intense rain.

By the end of the century, a Skagit River flood, expected once every 100 years, could increase in volume by nearly 50% by the 2080s, according to one study. Flood control measures, given the dams already installed on the river, would be “largely ineffective,” according to the research.

The best option for reducing future risks, Mauger said, is to give rivers more space.

With more storms on the horizon, dam operators have been forced to spill the dams upstream to prevent them from being overwhelmed.

John Taylor, King County Natural Resources and Parks director, said workers are monitoring a number of levees of concern and strengthening some they know are weak.

“You see levees that usually work pretty well in floods, start to fail because they’re saturated and there’s a lot of pressure on them,” he said.

The Skagit and Snoqualmie rivers are expected to reach or exceed major flood stage by Thursday morning.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com