Anger and Blame After Deadly Flood in Northwest

The big rain fell with fatal efficiency those first few days of December. It washed mud from mountainsides and lifted logs into the Chehalis River, which rose to a historic high as it roared downhill. Bridges broke. Cows drowned. Helicopters plucked people from rooftops.

The flood was devastating, and revealing, churning up once again the question that confounds the Pacific Northwest: How to balance people, water, fish, forests and farms? A month later, anger and blame accompany the giant dehumidifiers still being used to dry out houses.

“We’ve got to have a big public debate, and it’s got to result in action, not inaction,” said W. Jay Gordon, an organic dairy farmer who is executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation. “Maybe this will finally provoke that public discussion. It’s not just logging. It’s not just farming. It’s not just development, and it’s not just environmentalists.”

The storm that caused the flooding has been linked to at least six deaths in the Northwest and the loss of hundreds of farm animals. It instantly updated local building codes that require new development to be above the flood line. It has also prompted competing accusations that logging contributed to the damage and that efforts to protect salmon habitat left the river full of destructive debris.

“That’s part of it,” Pete Dykstra, a 64-year-old dairy farmer here whose 100 Holstein cattle drowned, said of the logging. “But part of it’s Mother Nature, too, and part of it’s the environmentalists.”

Mr. Dykstra and many other local residents attribute some of the damage to laws intended to protect salmon. “We can’t dredge it,” he said of the river. “And if a tree falls over, we can’t clear it out because that’s habitat.”

Tension has increased as more people move to this part of Washington, about 100 miles southwest of Seattle, bringing new development pressure and new ideas about how to use the land. Lewis County, which suffered much of the worst damage from the storm, had 59,000 people in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. Last year it had nearly 74,000.

While people still talk about the big flood of 1996, which inundated the region and closed Interstate 5, new retail development has been built in the flood plain since then, and some of the houses that flooded in December were under construction.

Like many other places in the Northwest outside big cities, Lewis County is trying to make its way from a declining economy based on logging and mining to one that meets new needs.

What had been the largest employer, a coal mine operated by TransAlta, closed late in 2006, taking 600 jobs. But the timber industry, in steady decline in many other places in the Northwest, has actually grown here in recent years, and the county has also lured warehouses for big companies like Fred Meyer, a department store, and Michaels, the chain of craft stores. They like the access to Interstate 5, which goes right through Lewis County and connects to ports in Seattle and Portland while it runs the length of the West Coast.

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