• U.S.

WEATHER: West Coast Blow

2 minute read
TIME

In the early evening, Seattle thermometers registered 62°—second highest December temperature in the city’s history.

Then big blobs of rain began falling. Soon a wind whipped the raindrops around. The wind rose, went on rising.

On Olympic Peninsula the wind reached hurricane velocity of 85 miles an hour, highest since the big blow of 1920. All over the Northwest trees and power lines crashed to earth: 20 towns were without electricity until next forenoon; two brothers were electrocuted when a wire fell on to their automobile. On one 100-mile stretch of Oregon highway, 30 big trees dropped across the pavement, stopped traffic dead. A Washington State patrolman used his brakes in a hurry when a trunk fell right in front of him. When he got out to look, another landed right behind, trapped him for fair. At the Kelso (Wash.) municipal airport, the gale lifted a temporary frame hangar off its foundations. Three planes skittered out across the field, wound up as overturned wrecks. Houseboats and small vessels broke from their harbor moorings; many smashed to smithereens against shore.

Next day the storm blew out as quickly as it had blown up, went whirling down the coast to batter California. There rain fell in whale-sized tubfuls: San Diego, which normally gets only three inches in the entire last half of the year, got more than that in a single day last week. At Salinas Airport, workmen anchored an iron hangar to four ten-ton ice trucks to keep it from blowing away. At a beach near San Francisco, waves slammed 100 feet beyond high water mark, knocked three houses off their underpinnings. Ten Coastguardsmen who set out to aid a damaged lumber schooner off Fort Bragg soon needed help themselves. They lashed their two small boats together, rode out 40-foot waves in rain and fog for 40 hours before they were rescued.

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