America’s next disaster: Multiple floods in Western states as monster snowpacks melt

Daily Mail

It's been one long series of natural disasters this year - and now it looks like another is on the way.

The focus may soon be shifting from the epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley to Westwern states where enormous winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges.

More than 90 sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May.



Unbelievable snow: It's late May and a vehicle
faces 23 feet of snow at Rock Cut on Trail Ridge Road

It's been one long series of natural disasters this year - and now it looks like another is on the way.

The focus may soon be shifting from the epic flooding in the Mississippi Valley to Westwern states where enormous winter snows have piled up on mountain ranges.

More than 90 sites from Montana to New Mexico and California to Colorado have record snowpack totals on the ground for late May.


This has been caused by a winter marked by blizzard and an unusually cold and wet spring.

Now there is a very real fear of localised flooding at those sites as the snowpacks melt under hotter, sunnier conditions in June.

A sudden thaw could mean millions of gallons of water rushing through river channels and narrow canyons.

Bob Struble, the director of emergency management for Routt County in north central Colorado, said: 'This could be a year to remember.

'All we can do is watch and wait.'

Early warning signs: After heaving rainfalls,
Montana was hit by floods this weekend and is
braced for more to come.

At risk in Routt County is Steamboat Springs, the county's largest town.
It sits about 30 miles from the headwaters of the Yampa River, a major tributary of the Colorado River that has 17ft of snow or more in parts of its watershed.

The last time the west was hit by serious flooding casued by mega-thaws was 1983.

Since then, however, several wide open areas that were hit have now been developed into towns.
In contrast to the floods on the Mississippi River, which is centred on one mighty waterway, the Western story is fragmented, with anxiety dispersed across dozens of large and small waterways that could surge individually or collectively, the New York Times reports.

In California, officials staged three days of flood training last week, running disaster scenarios filling sandbags and tying down tarp.

It shouldn't be like this: Ellen Sowers wades through
flood water along the South Fork of the Ogden River,
east of Huntsville, Utah

The state’s aging levee system has long been a source of concern, with fears of large-scale failures that could leave Sacramento, the state capital, vulnerable to a Hurricane Katrina-scale flood.

The worries are heightened this year by the deep snows in the Sierra Nevada, where some ski spots around Lake Tahoe saw more than 60ft this season.

At Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah, federal managers have begun spilling water downstream in readiness for the rising waters.

In the Wasatch Mountains outside Salt Lake City, where the Alta Ski Resort still has about 200 inches of snow, cool temperatures have kept snowpacks from crossing what hydrologists call the isothermal barrier — 32 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the snowmass — which allows gradual melting from the bottom.

Last week alone there was three feet of snow.

In sparsely-populated Wyoming, emergency officials are worried about tiny communities that in many cases are far from help if rivers surge.

Almost every county is in a potential snow-melt flood zone, and relatively few residents have flood insurance.

Scary stuff: National Water and Climate Centre map

In Colorado's Routt County, the terrain itself has changed, with thousands of acres of dead pine trees on high mountain slopes.