The Half-Hour Squall That Cut Seattle Off From the World
A sudden sixty-five-mile-an-hour squall tears through Seattle, snapping telegraph and telephone wires, shaking buildings and sending steamers and wharves into confusion on Elliott Bay.
Seattle was struck at about 6:30 yesterday afternoon by a squall that for half an hour made the wildest mixing of the elements experienced here in the recollection of the oldest inhabitant. The wind, rain, hail, thunder and lightning drove pedestrians to shelter, shook buildings, and laid telegraph and telephone wires low. The wind was estimated at sixty-five miles an hour.
In the harbor the steamer Flyer, coming in from Tacoma, turned toward West Seattle to rescue a man and woman clinging to a capsized boat. The steamers Home and North Pacific, out of commission, broke from their moorings at the buoys and drifted rapidly toward the Flyer’s dock. They came broadside to the wharf with little damage. The Rosalie had four lines broken; the tug Albert Lea had her house broken; the steamer Fairhaven broke her guard; Towle’s boathouse broke loose. The Slide, Captain J. F. Vandehoef, caught the storm broadside on her way from Des Moines to Vashon but ran under the lee of a bluff without accident. A small sailboat with a white man and his Indian wife was picked up by the Flyer and brought to the city; they were furnished with warm clothing. No known accident resulted from the squall.
“For full half an hour these various elements vied with each other as to which could be the most disagreeable.”
Seattle’s dependence on its waterfront and on fragile overhead wires made a half-hour storm a citywide event. The 1895 squall reads like a reminder of how quickly Puget Sound weather can still isolate neighborhoods, strand ferries and knock out communications. The details of boats, wharves and rescue at sea make the city’s maritime geography vivid.
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