The Heaviest Rain Ever Recorded Swamped Grays Harbor and Stranded the Trains
3.27 inches in twenty-four hours, a sixty-hour gale, and washouts from Elma to Ocosta: the November 1892 storm cut every rail line into Aberdeen and left the Wynooche out of its banks.
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 heaviest rainfall ever recorded fell between 9:30 a.m. Thursday and 9:30 a.m. Friday, according to Local Observer W. B. Mack, who sounded his rain gauge and found the exact figures were 3.27 inches — .02 more than fell in Tacoma. For sixty hours a piping gale blew from the southwest. The result was a general washout on all the railroads and a sliding and slipping of the land. The biggest landslide was on the Union Pacific at Bonneville, where the land covered several acres and lay six feet deep; so wonderful was it that there was talk of running special excursion trains from Portland to let people see it.
Traffic was blocked throughout the state. At home, the trains were shut in at Ocosta on Friday by a landslide at Markham, another east of Markham, a washout near South Arbor, a slide at South Arbor, a slide near Porter, and a washout just this side of Elma. On Saturday the train managed to get through by building a temporary bridge at the washout near Elma, everything else having been put in shape by the section gangs overnight.
As the train neared Montesano on Saturday the Wynooche was raging and out of its banks; the country for miles around was a foaming, muddy yellow lake. One family of four or five persons stood disconsolately on the porch of their house and watched the whirling waters all around them, just a few inches below their feet. On Sunday the train got through all right going east, but on reaching bridge No. 23, across the Cloquallum, coming back, the piles forming its support were found to have been undermined by the flood, and the bridge was condemned by the foreman. His report was that it would probably be necessary to get a pile-driver to the scene of the accident and put in new piles before the engine could cross in safety. As the nearest pile-driver was in the Cascade Division, that would necessarily take several days. The pile-driver was, however, hustled down yesterday, and the train got through about 8 p.m. that evening.
“Noah was no novice, and he would have launched the ark and started for Ararat could he have been in this part of the world during the latter part of last week.”
Aberdeen still floods — the Wishkah and the Chehalis routinely close roads and rail lines during atmospheric rivers. The 1892 storm set a benchmark that locals talked about for a generation, and the same infrastructure vulnerabilities persist today.
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