Excerpt:
This storm was off the charts.
The bomb cyclone emerged from the middle of the Pacific Ocean and swirled with such intensity off Washington’s coast that it ravaged the region Tuesday night, ripping down trees, toppling power lines and killing at least two.
Each storm like this is unique — with its own personality, said Lynn McMurdie, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
“And this one has a lot of personality,” she said.
Pressure dropped 27 millibars in six hours, about four times faster than the rate meteorologists use to label storms as bomb cyclones. It dropped so far and so fast that, under one method of analysis, it landed in a category reserved for the strongest of its kind: A “super explosive cyclone.”
Bomb cyclones are common enough but rarely form as far south as this one did and gather so much strength so quickly, said Jason Ahsenmacher, lead meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Fairbanks.
As far back as the records go, a cyclone this strong hasn’t formed before in this part of the world at this time of year, Ahsenmacher said. It belongs to an upper echelon of low-pressure systems.
After it began to form, the cyclone loosely tracked the Pacific jet stream. Counterclockwise it churned, heading toward the coast, building strength along the way.
Air over Western Washington rushed toward that low-pressure trough, generating wind gusts of up to 74 mph in places. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, marking Seattle’s most severe outage since 2006, while two died in the maelstrom. A woman was killed by a falling tree at a Lynnwood homeless encampment. In Bellevue, a 65-year-old another woman was killed by a tree that smashed into her home while she showered. The surrounding neighborhood was struck hard.
Robert Keeney surveyed the devastation to his family’s 6-acre property off 173rd Avenue Northeast on Wednesday. Toppled fir and cedar trees blanketed the landscape. Miraculously, none of the trees hit the house.
Not much else was spared.
Three cars were totaled: two buried under a flattened carport and a third crushed under a tree. The pump for a well that supplies the home with water was destroyed, along with a toolshed built by Keeney’s grandfather. A downed power line lay tangled among broken branches behind the house.
“It just kind of goes on and on — it’s absolutely overwhelming,” said Keeney’s sister-in-law, 74-year-old Kathleen Keeney, as she carefully stepped over broken branches. “It’s hard to even know where to start…”
