The Big Blow, forty-five years ago

I was outside, here in Seattle, in the gentle drizzle late last night. Rain draped down like sheers against the foggy night sky. The sound of rain is not just one sound, but a muted march of percussionists – the rum pum pum of water across the overhang; the steady tingtingting of the drops landing on the skin of the earth; the beat beat beat heading south in a gutter. It’s possible the first drummer mimicked sounds he heard in his own beating heart. I’m sure he heard the drums of rain.

It’s chilly. Did I mark the onset of Autumn last year? I returned to a diary written on September 14, 2006…Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men

September and it’s raining again in the Northwest. Blessed rain. We haven’t had much of it here this season, believe it or not.  Watching the weather is one of my obsessions and my way of marking time perhaps.
Saving old messages on my cell phone that I rarely track back through – it’s another peculiar habit I have. Sure, I get prompted every few weeks to save or delete. My oldest message on my cell dates to September 2005. The message is from my son-in-law on the evening he left for Iraq last year for his first tour.

Tonight’s a night much like September 14, 2006. Some things are the same and some things have changed irrevocably. My son-in-law is back in Iraq in his second tour, which will end in just over a month or so. I still have that message saved. I wonder how long a voicemail message will last or how long the carrier will allow it to remain saved.

In conversation with a neighbor today, the Columbus Day storm of 1962 came up as we talked about the weather over the past year. We both went back over our memories of it; she, five years older than I, recalled less of some of the details than I did. Her home was on Bainbridge Island at the time, and while the Puget Sound area was hit hard and impacts of the storm were seen as far north as northern British Columbia and east to Spokane, the hardest hit area was the Oregon Coast.

I was four years old in 1962 and it’s funny how much I remember of the frightening wind and most of all, the hurried preparations my dad took to shore up the motel we owned on Highway 101. He nailed plywood on the outside of plate glass windows. My mother and I carried out huge rolls of masking tape and I remember tearing tape sections and getting them all gummed and twisted up, and provided no help to my mother. She hurriedly taped the inside of the big boarded-up windows of each unit – though I’m still not sure why this was done.

My father set up the pump in the garage in the event the rains overflowed the highway; our driveway at the time was gravel and leveled out below the surface of the main road and flooding was a danger if rainfall amounts were greater than normal.  When my folks had secured the motel, Dad took off in his Yellow Chevy pickup to go the docks in downtown Bandon, where he worked as port manager. I remember Mother trying to insist that he didn’t have time to get down there…”Now, Mother, it’s my job.” He usually called her “Mother” in my presence; she called him “Daddy’, unless she was ticked, and then it was Alfred.

I suspect that he made certain the few boats that were still in the marina were well-secured. I recall that in advance of most storms on the coast, the ones we had warning of when I was young, it was often the habit of fishermen to motor up river to a more protected inland harbor less prone to ocean swell. A few hardy, or fool-hardy, souls would cross the river bar to the ocean and go miles out to sea to ride it out. The river bar of the Coquille was often too rough to attempt a crossing, but some tried. I’d guess my dad went to the dock to make sure such souls that were left in the harbor were secured against the creosoted pilings of the dock; souls asleep in the guts of tired fishing boats, snoring off the binge from a previous night’s take.

When the winds hit, I remember the flail of the treetops and the branches of coastal cedars and blocky pines arching over, with several breaking off and flying away wildly in the gale. Winds in Bandon were apparently sustained at times at well over 100 miles an hour for what seemed hours, likely less than a minute, and possible gusts as high as 160 mph on the bluffs above the beach on 11th street. Cape Blanco, the westernmost spot on the continental United States, just a few miles south of Bandon, informally recorded the highest coastal winds ever at 179 mph that October day in 1962.

My four year old child memories still rate that day the most terrifying and it is my baseline weather touchstone even now. 

The Columbus Day Storm was an “extratropical” cyclone – extratropical, I guess, because the circulation and pressure moved far north of the storm’s tropical genesis in the Central Pacific ocean. It wasn’t until just a few years ago when I started paying attention to hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific side, that I began to get curious about the recorded impact of the 1962 storm.

I discovered that the storm, which some call “The Big Blow”, was and still is, the strongest nontropical windstorm ever recorded in the continental United States. There were actually three separate storms, one following on the heels of the next, blowing through the Pacific NW in rapid sequence fronts moving at 20 to 40 miles per hour. The first smaller storm, brought the initial onset of strong winds, weakening trees and saturating the ground with rain. The second storm was a deep low pressure system formed out of Tropical Storm Freda, a circulation that originated in the Pacific near Wake Island and traveled along the Phillipines coastlines before turning eastward out to the ocean. This low pressure system caught a ride on the jet stream, which pushed it northward more than eastward as the circulation increased.  Generally, marine fronts off the Pacific bring storms that travel more or less west to east, with slight variations in northerly or southerly jaunts. The common pattern of the biggest Pacific systems moving into Oregon and Washington is a frontal movement directly into the shore, east across the coast mountain ranges on the western side of both states; then the systems generally run up against the Cascades, winds weakening against the updraft of air from the mountains. 

In the case of the Columbus Day storm, the circulation pattern was uniquely different. It was a very large and deep pressure system, one of the lowest pressures ever recorded that far north, and the cyclonic path hit the coastline moving almost due north up the coast, not north to northeast or due east. Having been a weather watcher for quite a few years, I can’t recall a similar northern movement of any of the windstorms we’ve had since, in either Oregon or Washington.

It was still early in the fall, and the leaves had not dropped from the trees. The sudden force of sustained winds against leafy trees amplified the damage on houses and roads, as trees with leaves are susceptible to far more movement and sway in high winds than bare trees.

Another factor that increased the impact of the “Big Blow” was that it hit its stride just as the major, secondary storm from Freda hit the coastline – rather than peaking out at sea and then dissipating in strength against the land mass. Winds actually increased in the northward path, caught in the upswing of the Jet Stream.

The third storm sealed the fate of those roofs and houses and farms that somehow made it through the massive winds of Freda’s child.  The devastating winds battered the Pacific Northwest for roughly 12 to 15 hours time on October 11 and October 12, 1962.

Some 23 to 25 people died in Oregon; 48 perished altogether across the States and BC.

Trees, houses, and power lines were destroyed throughout the state; in some cases residents were without power for 2 to 3 weeks. Giant towers holding the main power lines into Portland (over 500 feet high) were knocked down. The Red Cross estimated that 84 homes were completely destroyed, 5000 severely damaged, and 50,000 moderately damaged. 23 people died in Oregon alone, and damages were estimated at $170 million.
The 1962 Windstorm

The amount of timber lost in the western states – Washington, Oregon, and California – was estimated at over 11 billion board feet of lumber, an amount greater than the timber harvest of the previous year.

Photo courtesy National Weather Service Portland (Public Domain)

In less than 12 hours, over 11 billion board feet (26,000,000 m³) of timber was blown down in northern California, Oregon and Washington combined; some estimates put it at 15 billion board feet (35,000,000 m³). This exceeded the annual timber harvest for Oregon and Washington at the time. This value is above any blowdown measured for East Coast storms, including hurricanes: even the often-cited New England hurricane of 1938, which toppled 2.65 billion board feet (6,000,000 m³), falls short by nearly an order of magnitude.
The Columbus Day Storm of 1962

An essay, News from the Northwest posted by melvin last Tuesday, discusses the Grassy Knob Wilderness area, and the bills in Congress that propose to create the 13,700-acre Copper River Salmon Wilderness in SW Oregon. These regions together form over 30,000 acres of  wilderness and what is left of old-growth forest. Before the Columbus Day storm in 1962, even after decades of independent logging forays by both established small timber companies and gyppo loggers, this entire heavily forested, old growth area had accountably fewer than a dozen known logging roads forged into the dense timber growth and salal underbrush. After the blowdown, hundreds of logging tracks were carved into the untamed, tumbled forests to harvest the “easy” money.

Dad pulled the plywood off of the windows of the motel units and built a smoke shed out in the backyard to smoke the salmon he’d often bring home from fishermen down at the docks.  Fishermen who slept in the bellies of their boats, and who’d share a Hamm’s beer or two after long days on the ocean.

I remember the dark days after the storm when we were without power, and only the local AM radio station played in the candlelight. The radio knob had to be massaged just right to pull the station in on the dial. With the electricity out for days, I was allowed to lie on the couch with a blanket and pillow until my folks went to bed. I remember my folks dancing on the new carpet in the living room one of those October late nights to something on the midnight radio show.

Dad was singing as he led my mom around the room; it must have been “Crazy” and it must have been Patsy.

One: there once was a girl

Two: Fields, Motels, and Gideon’s Bibles

(This is Three)

Thanks for reading.

Photos, except where cited, courtesy of the archives of the Salem (Oregon) Public Library Historic Photograph Collections