When weather forecasters last week announced the remnants of Pacific Typhoon Songda would slam into the Pacific Northwest Saturday, bringing excessive rain and wind gusts potentially up to 60 mph, islanders began to prepare for the worst.
Thriftway was bustling with activity Thursday, Friday and Saturday, resulting in some empty shelves Thursday where canned vegetables, soups and gallon containers of water once were. In the days leading up to the storm’s forecasted Saturday night landfall, Vashon Island Fire & Rescue (VIFR) Interim Assistant Chief Bob Larsen met with VashonBePrepared’s Rick Wallace for storm briefings multiple times a day. The island’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and ham radio group were also notified to be prepared in case of deployment.
Some island events were also cancelled ahead of the unfavorable weather predictions. On Friday, Neighborcare Health announced the Saturday open house at Vashon’s new clinic was postponed. A new date for the event has not yet been set. Shortly after that, Vashon Center for the Arts announced that “due to dangerous weather conditions,” Saturday’s concert, “Close To You: The Music of the Carpenters,” was cancelled and rescheduled for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 6, 2017. Tickets purchased for this month’s show will be honored at the May show. Refunds are available for those who will not be able to attend. Vashon High School’s home football game against Chimacum High School was also postponed due to the closure of the Hood Canal Bridge. The game was played Monday night and the Pirates earned their first win of the season, 55-35.
Heavy rain began to fall Thursday night and into Friday — the National Weather Service reported more than 1.5 inches of rain fell Thursday, according to measurements for Gig Harbor and SeaTac airport — but winds remained relatively calm. Two small power outages were reported on Vashon Friday: 16 customers were without power in the Luana Beach area on Maury Island and 17 were without power on Vashon’s southwest side, near Reddings Beach. Warnings for a destructive Saturday storm continued.
“It has been very wet overnight and somewhat windy on Vashon but not severe so far,” VashonBePrepared’s Wallace said Friday morning. “Meanwhile, the Saturday storm is shaping up to deliver pretty severe winds. It’s a certainty we’ll have power outages, trees down and roads closed.”
On Saturday morning, that forecast changed. According to a Voice of Vashon alert from that morning, the early morning Vashon-specific forecasts from the National Weather Service and Weather Underground predicted “the storm will be less intense than earlier projected and that it will arrive earlier with highest intensity in the evening hours tonight.”
The storm rolled in on the Pacific Northwest’s coast, bringing large waves and even a tornado to Oregon’s coast, but the weather remained relatively calm on Vashon with rain and wind, but nothing too far out of an ordinary blustery autumn day.
By 9 p.m. Saturday, Wallace said National Weather Service forecasters downgraded the wind forecast for the area from a High Wind Warning to a Wind Advisory.
“On Vashon there were a few gusts around 40 mph, but generally it’s very good to know that so far the wind strengths just didn’t materialize on the island,” Wallace said. “It appears the surface low was weaker than forecast and the track was farther west and north.”
He said the storm’s shift in pressure spared most of Western Washington from “widespread damaging wind.”
The largest power outage on the island was reported Saturday night around 6 p.m. According to Puget Sound Energy’s outage map, 160 customers in the area of Cowan Road on Vashon’s north end were without power. Another 40 customers were without power on Maury Island near 47th Avenue and Point Robinson Road. All power was restored as of Monday morning.
At VIFR, Larsen said the weekend was “pretty regular” for the department.
“We had nothing major in either sense (storm-related or routine calls),” he said Monday. “There was, I think, three or four trees down and then just typical aid calls.”
The forecast for this week calls for rain with highs in the low to mid 50s and evening lows in the high 40s.
