West Seattle Weather Watch: Road flooding and wild wind

Five seconds of video is all we could shoot before the light turned and we had to go through that BIG puddle – deeper than it looks (it always is) – at West Marginal and Highland Park Way (map). Deep water in all directions right there, in fact. Not the only early-morning trouble spot, either – an even more treacherous stretch of water swamped the street about half a mile north, across West Marginal. So until and unless you hear it’s OK in the am, we’d say “steer clear.” Meantime, as of this moment, the wind is suddenly rocking WSB HQ stronger than at any point last night. Sure hope the “calming down by tonight” forecast turns out to be right. (To see what’s up with road trouble in the rest of King County, check here; for stream-flow info in various areas [not WS], go here; for the WSB Traffic page, with cameras and “latest incidents” links, go here.)

brittany January 8, 2009 (10:45 am)

fyi- this was all clear when i drove thru at 8:45 this morning. phew.

WSB January 8, 2009 (11:17 am)

Thanks for that confirmation – we monitored traffic reports early this morning and would have posted if we’d had word it was still swamped, but I was about to go back down and doublecheck in person, you just saved me 15 sorely needed minutes :) – TR

jay January 8, 2009 (12:19 pm)

That section of West Marginal (just north of Highland Park) is swamped on a regular basis. Yesterday afternoon, before the heavy rains had really even started, there was already water covering an entire lane. The runoff from the greenbelt area to the west is pretty impressive during storms.

WSB January 8, 2009 (12:33 pm)

That’s what we saw as we drove back up the hill (I set the video cam on the dashboard but it became an impediment to driving so that idea didn’t work, going uphill) – a river all its own, rushing down the gutter, coming off the West Duwamish Greenbelt. Will know to look there proactively in the next major rainstorm – when we covered the one in December 2007, almost everything we heard about/saw/got pix off was from Longfellow in N. Delridge.

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