Editor’s note: On Saturday The Chronicle will begin a week-long look at the potential impact of new federal flood maps for the Chehalis Basin. In advance of this series, today we observe the 15th anniversary of the high water mark during the flood of 1996, with a look back at the history of flooding in the Twin Cities.
For a decade, it was The Big One.
The flooding that washed through the Twin Cities on this day 15 years ago was referenced simply as “back in ‘96” when people talked with knowing awe, and lingering pain, about the highest that the water had ever gotten.
Homebuyers, renters and business owners who would ask, “Does this place flood?” would be answered with a reference to whether or not the property got wet in February of 1996.
Water from the Skookumchuck raged through downtown Centralia and parts of Fords Prairie. Interstate 5 and the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds became a lake from Chehalis River water.
Eleven years later, the deluge of December 2007 changed that historic frame of reference for much (but not all) of the Twin Cities. In some places, including downtown Centralia, 1996 is still the mark for how high the water can go.
These past two floods, though they may be the worst in history, are only the latest in an epoch-long relationship between the Chehalis Valley and the river that runs through it. From deep riverbank sediment to dusty history books and vivid living memories, the story of past floods has thoroughly soaked into the soil and heart of our community.
From 14 Feet Under, a Story of the Past
The earliest evidence of humans living in the area that is now the Twin Cities dates back to between 1,100 and 7,200 years ago. A 2003 archeological dig at the old Centralia Wastewater Treatment Plant found evidence of seasonal camps near the “choke point” at the Mellen Street bridge. Artifacts discovered there were called the oldest ever found in a Western Washington floodplain.
Scientists working 14 feet underground uncovered stone hunting tools, including sharpened rocks used on throwing sticks, known as atlatls. Researchers also found evidence of what Centralia’s earliest residents liked to eat: roasted camas bulbs and red huckleberry.
A few thousand years later, Chehalis Indians still used that soggy area where China Creek feeds into the Chehalis River, calling that swampy area “Muckla,” according to oral histories collected in the 1942 history book “Centralia: The First Fifty Years.”
Some tribal members had permanent winter homes on the higher ground on the other side of the Skookumchuck, to the north, on the prairie later named after settler Sidney Ford. The native people called that area “Tasunshun,” meaning “resting place.” A settlement at the mouth of the Skookumchuck River was named “a cross in the river,” or Tuaoton.
Experience of Explorers and Settlers
One of the first recorded white visitors to the Twin Cities area, globe-trotting naturalist David Douglas, sounded a sour note about his experiences in the soggy Chehalis Valley during a November 1825 trip.
His journals relate the miseries and deluges of his trip on the “Cheecheeler River.” Sixty miles from Grays Harbor — possibly near present-day Centralia, although it’s impossible to say for sure — he could go no farther in his guide’s Indian canoe. The next 40 miles he slogged through mud and flooded streams as he pressed south to the “Cow-a-lidsk River.”
“Much water was in the hollows, and the little creeks and rivulets so much swollen that my clothes were often off three times swimming across some of them,” a grumpy Douglas wrote.
The permanent settlers who came to the Chehalis Basin 30 years later settled in the floodplains and valleys where the ground was flat, the soil was easy to till and there were fewer giant trees to fell. They often spoke of the vast floods that washed through the area between the Skookumchuck River and the settlement of George Saunders, a muddy area sometimes known in those days as “Saunders Bottom.”
Winter travelers passing north past Saunders’ homestead in the 1850s were “obliged to swim their horses through the swales,” according to settler Phoebe Goodell Judson in her memoirs, “A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home.”
Even then, the land between Centralia and Chehalis was often known as a giant lake four miles across. A joke told at the time said if a traveler saw a hat floating on the flood, he shouldn’t be surprised to see a horse and rider rise up from beneath it a moment later.
A story told in “Centralia: The First Fifty Years” says one immigrant group camped one night at the site known today as the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds. They awoke the next morning to find themselves on a tiny island in a sea of water, with a mile to dry land in every direction. One man swam for help and returned with a raft. The area of the fairgrounds was known as “Wet Prairie” in one detailed 1853 account of the hazards of traveling through the area.
Rinse, Repeat
Almost as soon as the Twin Cities had newspapers, their pages were filled with accounts of flooding. The first, in 1887, noted that two men were killed in a flooded stream near present-day Bucoda.
In 1896 a flood washed out the bridge near Claquato. In 1906 a train engineer and fireman died on a trip from Gate City, west of Rochester, to Olympia. Trains near Pe Ell were stranded by water over the tracks.
In 1910 water covered the first floor of many downtown Centralia businesses, and much of the northern part of the Hub City was under water. A 1915 flood was called “Worst in City’s History” in Centralia. The same headline was repeated almost word for word four years later during a 1919 deluge that turned Fords Prairie into “a veritable sea.”
A December 1933 flood overtopped them all. A driver drowned when his car was swept away by the raging Newaukum River. Trains couldn’t reach Chehalis for 33 hours. Tower Avenue in downtown Centralia was knee-deep in water.
Floods hit periodically throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, with a 1959 flood creating a logjam that pushed against the Mellen Street bridge in Centralia.
Another logjam, this one in 1972, threatened the Rainbow Falls bridge. That flood pushed a trailer into the Chehalis River near Adna and a home into the Newaukum River. High water returned in 1974 and 1977.
In 1986 flooding washed toxic chemicals from the American Crossarm and Conduit factory on Chehalis Avenue into nearby neighborhoods. That flood pushed into the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds and over Harrison Avenue.
A November 1990 flood killed two people who drove into floodwaters.
The February 1996 flood was the mother of them all, until the December 2007 deluge that blasted down from West Lewis County, washing out bridges, pushing homes off their foundations and setting the new standard by which future flooding will be judged.
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Brian Mittge, assistant editor of The Chronicle, welcomes comments and news tips via bmittge@chronline.com or (360) 807-8234.
