Lewis County Sirens.com

A contractor cuts up a Douglas Fir that dropped across the roof of a home on Middle Fork Road between Chehalis and Onalaska.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – At least three houses in Lewis County were damaged from downed trees during Monday night’s windstorm according to information compiled by early yesterday, and reports continued to come in throughout the day.

Lewis County’s division of emergency management said the wind blew through about 9:30 p.m. Monday and caused widespread damage and power outages from Centralia to Ashford. The strongest gusts of up to 40 mph came between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., according to a news release.

“We’re getting more damage reports from around the area, mostly in the east end from Packwood, Randle and Ashford,” Sgt. Ross McDowell, deputy director of emergency management said Tuesday evening.

Even Gene Seiber, the former deputy director of emergency management and current chief criminal deputy at the sheriff’s office, was affected. A 20-foot limb the diameter of a baseball punched a hole in the roof of Seiber’s Packwood-area home.

“There’s a lot of damage up there,” Seiber said. “There are trees and limbs all over the place in High Valley.”

He described a neighbor’s porch that was destroyed by a 12-inch in diameter fir tree that just missed the house when it crashed down.

The houses McDowell knew for sure were hit with trees were in Paradise Estates in Ashford, on Crystal Way in Morton and the 300 block of Middle Fork Road near Onalaska.

Susan Burnett, who has lived on the nine wooded acres between Onalaska and Chehalis for 20 years, said she felt really lucky when she saw her house in the daylight.

“It’s not really as bad as I expected, after leaving in a panic and coming back,” Burnett said.

A Douglas Fir, estimated to be as tall as 150 feet, had dropped across her roof, stretching from the front to the back of the house.

Burnett’s electricity and heat was shut off yesterday as contractors took a chainsaw to the fallen tree.

Inside, she said, the tongue-in-groove ceiling was broken from front to back. She was most worried about a collection of art work, painted by her great-grandfather and other relatives, which were among the debris in her dining room.

The manager at Lewis County Head Start said her insurance company got the contractors there by about 1 p.m. and an appraiser would be out by Friday to tally up the dollar damage.

Burnett said she was watching a movie Monday night when she began to hear fir cones and branches hitting the roof. The storm came on really fast, she said.

Then she could hear a tree falling, its branches breaking off as it toppled.

“I just stood there and hoped I was standing in the right place, and I guess I was,” said Burnett, who escaped injury.

She called 911, but the wind was still so strong, she didn’t dare go outside for fear of getting struck by limbs that continued to fall, she said.

When firefighters arrived, they stayed only long enough to turn off the electricity, check Burnett’s well-being and and cut a path so Burnett could get her car out. It had been parked next to the house, beneath where the fir fell but was mostly unmarred.

“The planets were aligned right or something,” she said.

McDowell said he didn’t think the dollar amount of damage in Lewis County was great enough to meet the threshold for disaster assistance.

However, the state Emergency Management Division is encouraging members of the public who received physical damage to their home or business to report it to their local emergency management agency.

Contact information for each county can be found here

A winter storm warning remains in effect through 10 a.m. tomorrow in East Lewis County – on the west slopes of the central and northern Cascade Mountains and passes – and is primarily expected to bring snow.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – By 5:30 this evening, the deputy director of Lewis County’s division of emergency management had moved beyond this morning’s earthquake.

“Earthquake?” Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Ross McDowell responded, then launched into how as the day progressed, his people began getting more and more calls about windstorm damage from last night.

And, the region can expect more wind tonight, McDowell said. Then tomorrow into the evening, the amount of rain is expected to be enough to possibly cause surface flooding in some places, and as much as two feet of snow may fall at elevations above 2000 feet, he said. Be prepared, was his message.

On this morning’s magnitude 4.2 earthquake near Mossyrock, he had heard very little.

“Nobody has called with any damage,” McDowell said. “None at all.”

The latest information indicates it hit at  7:51 a.m. three miles northeast of Mossyrock and seven miles west of Morton, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

It was recorded at a depth of 9.1 miles.

The information – now reviewed by a seismologist – comes from the University of Washington Department of Earth and Space Sciences.

It made the list of notable Pacific Northwest earthquakes since 1993, compiled by the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. It is matched during 2010 only by a quake of similar magnitude on June 17 near Yakima.

A sensor at the base of the Mossyrock Dam detected motion, but not enough to trigger an alarm, according to a spokesperson for Tacoma Power which operates two dams on the Cowlitz River in East Lewis County.

They conducted inspections and did not find any damage, spokesperson Chris Gleason said today.

“We feel very confident there was no impact to the dam,” she said.

They checked the Mossyrock Dam – at the west end of Riffe Lake – and also the smaller Mayfield Dam farther west, she said.

What was felt around Lewis County ranged from a jolt to a swaying house.

They felt it good at the Chehalis Police Department.

“It shook the whole building here, the records tech actually ran out of the building,” police detective Sgt. Rick McNamara said.

At the Chehalis Fire Department, “the building just kinda went whooomp,” according to Firefighter Jay Birley.

“It knocked all my taxidermy work (including an elk head) off the wall,” said Lewis County Fire District 5 Firefighter Brad Bozarth, whose home is on Holcum Road west of Napavine.

On Rhoades Road, north of Winlock: “I was at home just about ready to get up for work and the walls were shaking,” Lewis County Fire District 15 Firefighter Kevin Anderson said. “My house was swaying and everything.”

Paramedic Brad Flexhaug was in the new quarters of Lewis County Medic One east of Winlock at state Route 505 and North Military Road.

“Here, it was just one big boom, basically is what it was,” Flexhaug said. “We didn’t know what it was.”

Closer to the apparent epicenter, some folks were less startled.

Dave DeBuhr lives off Justus Road east of Cinebar.

“It wasn’t much of anything here, it lasted maybe two seconds DeBuhr said. “Kind of a little, enough to make the dog’s ears perk.”

A few of the area residents called him – he’s chief of Lewis County Fire District 8 based in Salkum – and an individual who lives on Mayfield Lake “said it rumbled pretty good,” he said. “I kept looking at Mount St. Helens to see if it was smoking. It was not.”

Matt Hadaller was out hunting in the Winston Creek area.

“Did I feel it? You bet,” the chief of Lewis County Fire District 3 said. “I heard a roar, I thought the wind was blowing through the trees, but then the ground where I was moved.”

Morton City Clerk Sherry Claycamp was just arriving at City Hall.

“I was just getting ready to open the door in the back; and just a little tremor, the building shook a little,” Claycamp said. “Enough to know it was a quake, not enough to create panic.”

In Mossyrock, City Clerk Jeanette Miller said she didn’t even hear of anything falling off a shelf.

“In fact here, it was just a jolt, and then it was over,” Miller said.
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Look at information from Pacific Northwest Seismic Network here

Check the National Weather Service’s Forecast Office in Seattle here for a winter storm warning in East Lewis County and a special weather statement about coming cold weather for West Lewis County.

Note: a link for the weather forecast website can also always be found on the right-hand sidebar of Lewis County Sirens’ homepage

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – The cause of the airplane crash that killed three people with the Chehalis eye surgery clinic three weeks ago likely won’t be known for sure until late next year, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator said today.

Wayne Pollack, a senior air safety investigator with the NTSB’s Western Pacific Region, said the final report won’t come until after the examination of some of the Cessna wreckage’s components which are being shipped to lab and manufacturer personnel around the country.

“There’s a lot of work that has to go on on this,” Pollack said this afternoon.

The six-seater Cessna 340A was recovered four days after it went down some nine miles northeast of Morton. Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute employees Dr. Paul Shenk and Rod Rinta were traveling from the Chehalis-Centralia Airport to Lewiston, Idaho the morning of Oct. 25 when their pilot Ken Sabin reported one engine was down and then radio contact was lost.

The initial findings suggest the front of the plane was pointed downward when it hit, according to Pollack.

“The evidence indicated the aircraft descended in a ‘nose-low’ attitude,” he said.

He said the impact was such that parts of the aircraft were actually buried in the ground.

The impact crater was five feet deep and they found portions of the forward fuselage, cockpit and engine underground, he said. Hundreds of components were scattered around the site, he said.

The remote site, accessed off state Route 7, was described as in a dense patch of young planted trees across a hillside and a ravine at an elevation of about 3,500 feet. It was a foot hike of about 350 feet up rough terrain for personnel from the sheriff’s office, coroner’s office, search and rescue and the NTSB.

The recovered portions of the plane were reassembled in a facility in Seattle in what Pollack described as a “wreckage layout”.

His investigation is now in the shipment phase for further examination to locations, including the NTSB’s lab in Washington D.C.
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Read previous news story about the plane crash here