Washington infrastructure begins to fail as atmospheric rivers continue pummeling the state

Several levees have failed, more than a dozen highways are shuttered and one person is dead in Washington state as atmospheric river storms continue to pound the region and test its infrastructure.

The state’s dams and levees largely held up during the first wave of storms last week, but the rain has kept coming, so some have started to get overwhelmed.

At the same time, a patchwork of low-lying areas across western Washington remain filled with slowly receding floodwaters.

Gov. Bob Ferguson said at a news conference Tuesday that there have been over 1,200 rescues across 10 counties since Dec. 8. Thirteen state highways are still closed, and one of the main arteries across the Cascade mountains, Highway 2, could remain closed for months. The biggest artery — Interstate 90, which crosses the state — has had closures due to major mudslides, as well.

“Our infrastructure has been compromised,” Ferguson said. “There’s tremendous stress on that infrastructure.”

A 33-year-old man died in Snohomish County, north of Seattle, early Tuesday after he drove into a ditch alongside a flooded farm road in a rural area.

“We believe that’s the first fatality as a result of these storms,” Ferguson said, adding that it was a minor miracle there haven’t been more deaths.

Courtney O’Keefe, director of communications at the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, said that the man’s vehicle, a Chevy Tahoe, had driven past road blocks and that the victim had called a friend when his car became submerged in flood waters. That friend called 911.

“There’s a ditch that drops down the side of the roadway. With floodwaters, it would be hard to tell where the ditch ends and road begins,” O’Keefe said, adding that the death remained under investigation.

In the last two days, two levees have been breached in suburbs of Seattle.

The most recent, on Tuesday morning, was in the town of Pacific, near the White River.

“About 12:30 last night, there was a leak discovered about the size of a fire hose,” said Sheri Badger, a public information officer for the King County Office of Emergency Management. “It then expanded to about 120 feet long.”

The semipermanent levee was built with HESCO barriers, a tool made of wire mesh and fabric that is filled with sand, soil or gravel. The barriers had been stacked on top of one another, Badger said, and water was flowing through the gaps between them.

The county sent an evacuation alert to 1,300 people in the area. Crews have been working to add sandbags and “super sacks” — large nylon sandbags — to reinforce the breached sections.

On Monday, a 6-foot section of another levee was washed out in the town of Tukwila, south of Seattle, along the Green River. King County sent evacuation alerts to about 1,100 people, but workers quickly filled the breached area, limiting damage.

The levee was damaged in floods about four years ago and hadn’t yet been fully repaired.

At least two dams are being monitored for cracks and potential breaches, according to the state Department of Ecology. One, Lake Sylvia Dam, was listed as in “poor condition” with “significant” hazard after its last inspection in November 2024, according to the National Inventory of Dams. It was built in 1918.

Andrew Wineke, a spokesman for the department, said that several roads would be at risk if the dam failed but that no houses or people would be directly affected.

Much of western Washington is covered in rivers that descend steeply from the Cascade mountains. Those streams — which flow to Puget Sound — once formed meandering, braided tangles along wide flood plains. But starting more than a century ago, people began to dam and straighten many of them for drinking water, flood control and hydropower. The streams became channelized rivers — superhighways for flowing water.

Since then, people have been fortifying dike systems to contain the water, often building housing and industrial buildings as close to the edge as flood plain planners allow.

Some areas that have been hit hard by flooding have flooded before and will again.

Atmospheric rivers like the recent storm systems can look like fire hoses from the tropics on weather radar systems.

Such storms are nicknamed “Pineapple Expresses” because they sometimes draw moisture and warmth from Pacific waters near Hawaii and other parts of the tropics.

The Pacific Northwest can usually handle one or two such storms without much problem, but it has had three major pulses of intense rain since Dec. 8 Some parts of the North and Central Cascades — the steepest and most rugged mountains in the continental U.S. — got up to 16 inches of rain over three days.

“The atmospheric river events were big but not historic,” State Climatologist Guillaume Mauger said. “What’s notable is that they were back-to-back.”

He said more intense river flooding is expected in the future because rising temperatures mean more precipitation is falling as rain as opposed to snow. A warmer atmosphere also causes more intense rain.

By the end of the century, according to one study, a flood on the Skagit River that could be expected once every 100 years could increase in volume by nearly 50% by the 2080s. Flood control measures, given the dams already on the river, would be “largely ineffective,” the research found.

The best option to reduce future risk, Mauger said, is to give rivers more space.

With more storms on the horizon, dam operators have been forced to spill upstream dams to prevent their being overwhelmed.

John Taylor, the director of natural resources and parks for King County, said workers are monitoring a number of levees of concern and beefing up some that they know to be weak.

“You’re seeing levees that typically perform pretty well in floods begin to fail because the levees are getting saturated and there’s a lot of pressure on them,” he said.

Both the Skagit and Snoqualmie rivers are expected to reach or exceed major flood stage by Thursday morning.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com