Floods, Mud Block Roads in Northwest

Three days of driving rain and melted snow triggered floods and mudslides in Oregon and Washington, blocking roads and stranding residents, authorities said.

As downpour gave way to drizzle Tuesday, the flood waters retreated in this coastal dairy town, reducing pastures to mud and choking roads with tree trunks, tires and other debris.

The swollen Wilson River finally dipped below flood stage, and workers cleared away the mudslide debris from busy U.S. Highway 101. Transportation workers escorted cars through the shallow waters still flowing over the road.

Steve Baertlein, owner of Coast Tire Factory, spent much of the day chasing down more than 300 tires that floated away when chest-high flood waters swamped his garage.

Dairy farmer Don Josi worked all night shoveling mud from his road so a milk truck could get through. “It just trashed us. We got mud all over everything.”

More than 4 inches of rain fell Sunday and Monday along the Oregon coast, drenching ground already soaked by melted snow that had fallen before Christmas.

Mudslides also were a problem in Washington, and some mountain routes were closed Monday for fear of avalanches.

In the South, meanwhile, about 42,100 Virginia customers remained without power and fewer than 1,000 Tennessee customers still reported outages in the wake of a Christmas ice storm. Damage estimates throughout the region ran into the tens of millions of dollars.

State officials were asking residents in sparsely populated communities to look in on housebound neighbors to make sure they have heat and food.

The appeal came after officials said three elderly people, all living alone in central Virginia without heat or power, died of hypothermia. Authorities also investigated two other deaths that may be related to the storm.

The central United States was warned Tuesday that it would be next for a powerful storm. The storm due late New Year’s Eve should leave behind six to 10 inches of snow from central Nebraska to Chicago by Sunday, meteorologists said.

“It certainly looks like the biggest winter storm so far this winter,” said Craig Solberg, meteorologist with Freese-Notis Weather in Des Moines.

Farther north, more than a dozen people were stranded Tuesday after an ice floe broke off in Lake St. Clair in eastern Michigan.

Coast Guard Petty Officer David Sapp said five people had been rescued from the floe and at least eight more were still on it. Two more people were rescued from a different floe farther north on the lake’s Anchor Bay. No one was reported in the water.

Coast Guard boats were rescuing people from the floe and dropping them off on solid ice about 300 yards from shore.

Most of the people involved were on the ice fishing.

“The ice is way too thin for people to be out on it,” Sapp said.