Last week, approximately 78,000 residents in the Skagit River floodplain in Washington state were ordered to evacuate as back-to-back atmospheric rivers saturated the region. The water surpassed historical marks, notes Robert Ezelle, director of the Washington Military Department’s Emergency Management Division.
“What we have seen in actuality is it came through right at about the record flood level,” he told AgDay. “That doesn’t mean to say that we’re out of the woods. We’re not, because as the waters come down here, they’re still going to be gaining strength. And as they hit the Burlington, Mt. Vernon area, we’re still expecting to see about 2 feet higher than record flood level. It’s going to be most likely worse than you experienced back in 2021.”
Last week’s storm impacted many parts of Chelan County, as well as other parts of the Pacific Northwest, where officials evacuated Washington State University’s Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center in Mount Vernon due to high water and flood warnings.
The impact stretched across the Cascades into the Cashmere Valley, where Randall Chipman, a certified crop adviser in Cashmere Valley between Wenatchee and Leavenworth, scouted area orchards to assess what he saw. In a video he posted on LinkedIn, a pear block in Cashmere that usually sits 10 feet or more above the waterline had trees pulled up with roots almost 5 feet in the air.
“The main concern now is, alright, where are we going to get our topsoil back?” he says in the video. “We have all of our roots exposed. It’s going to be more detrimental than maybe just having regular soggy feet. Now we have to wait for next year, but keep an eye on it.”
Chipman says a bright spot to the flooding is that it hit during dormancy, when trees have already shut down for the winter. Prolonged wetness isn’t necessarily as much of a concern as exposed roots. And, he says in the winter, most orchards are waterlogged with snow, so this is almost the same thing.
“Realistically, dormancy will help,” he says. “We’re not worried about waterlogging. If it was during this season and we had fruit on the trees, then you have no oxygen, and then that’s it’s an issue.”
Chipman says some pear growers in the area have experienced flooding, but nothing to the extent that happened last week.
“It’s going to be this annoying thing that we’ve never really thought we had to deal with,” he says.
And he’s also optimistic that all this rainfall could help limit pear psylla pressure next growing season, though he says he needs to monitor pest pressure next year to see if his assumptions play out. Instead of psylla overwintering under the limbs of nearby pine trees, it could be those rains could have washed the psylla out of the trees, he says.
“We’re essentially doing an overhead wash right now, which is a pest management strategy for washing psylla out of a tree,” Chipman says.
He points out that growers in the Hood River of Oregon have much less pear psylla pressure, which could be due in part to the amount of rainfall the area gets compared with the Cashmere Valley.
“It’s not exactly on the packing side of things, but it would be interesting to find out,” he says. “It’s definitely an interesting horticultural phenomenon of sorts.”
