MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, Wash. -- Warming temperatures, and moderate to heavy rain are combining to create a variety of new problems for storm weary Western Washington. Concrete like slush is clogging storm drains leading to the potential for urban flooding warned the National Weather Service in Seattle.
The warm up moved its way from up from the south, with a pocket of frigid air hovering over western Whatcom County, led to another dose of freezing rain. For the rest of the region though the thaw was well underway Friday night.
On Snohomish County’s Seattle Hill which was walloped with three major bouts of snowfall over the past week, the roads are turning to a soupy mess, proving just as troublesome for drivers as snow and ice.
“Even with four wheel drive, it’s just too much,” Aaron Brooks said as he tried to tow a stranded car out of the muck. When the rain started falling it was like throwing down a layer of lubricant on his street. “Down at the bottom of the hill where the water is running off it is getting genuinely slippery,” he said.
Mill Creek area resident Rich Johnson was helping a neighbor also stranded; only he was using his back, and not his pick up. He said a sand truck had been by much earlier, but no plows. “The roads are too bad to waste a plow down here though it is a pretty steep hill, so quite a few people can’t get out,” he said.
Not everyone was home bound. At one Safeway, it looked like a mall parking lot on Black Friday, with the parking lot jammed. Shoppers had trouble navigating their carts through the quicksand like mire. Lisa Wood had her daughter Olivia in a shopping cart struggling to get to her car. “The roads are fine, it is the parking lot that is the problem,” she said.
Local governments are asking homeowners to clear storm drains in front of their homes to help lessen the potential for flooding.
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