Pacific Northwest Rivers Run Wild in Record Floods
Spring freshets across Washington and British Columbia wash away bridges, drown crops, and halt the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railways.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The water in the Hughe river remains at the same stage practically as yesterday, with reports from up the river of a slight rise. The worst news is that the dike near Arnon Dunsmoor's place is sagging into the river and will soon break, flooding the Beaver marsh. A force of men is busy throwing up a dike bank, but it is feared that the old dike will give way before the new one is done. Mount Vernon is deeper than ever in water, but the people are getting used to it and do not apprehend any further danger. The Great Northern railway is faring badly between here and Fir, seven miles below, and the grade is washed out from the track for a large part of that distance. At New Westminster, the great rush of water from the interior continues, and though it will be two weeks yet before the worst arrives, the level of the river today is higher than extreme highwater mark of last year. Everywhere along the river the lowlands are flooded, and great damage has been done to growing crops. The first disaster occurred last night, eight miles up the river, when 1,000 feet of the Matsqui dyke succumbed to the tremendous pressure of the freshet.
“In the memory of the oldest inhabitant the water has never come up with the same tremendous rush.”
Massive seasonal flooding was a perennial threat to the industrial and agricultural development of the Skagit and Fraser Valleys. Today, extensive levee systems and dams like the Skagit River project manage these flows, though climate change and atmospheric river events continue to force modern residents to reckon with the same low-lying floodplains.
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