The bridge over Tom Miner Basin on Highway 89 south of Livingston collapsed when a heavy flood caused mudslides in Yellowstone National Park, Montana, on June 13th. Larry Mayer / The Associated Press
Higher-than-a-century floods have ravaged Yellowstone National Park and its environs, sweeping homes, clearing bridges and roads, stranding tourists and residents, and causing frantic helicopter and raft rescues.
Flooding in southern Montana and northern Wyoming due to rainy days and a rapidly melting layer of snow closed indefinitely one of the country’s most iconic parks just as a summer tourist season was expanding. attracts millions of visitors.
North of the park, hundreds of people remained isolated on Tuesday after the Yellowstone River believed it to be higher than it had ever seen in a chocolate brown torrent that swept away anything in its path. Although no one was killed or injured, the waters began to recede on Tuesday and the full extent of the destruction was unknown.
“It’s just the scariest river in history,” Kate Gomez of Santa Fe, New Mexico said Tuesday. “Everything that falls into this river is gone. The waves are huge and they’re just mud and silt.”
Gomez and her husband were among the hundreds of tourists trapped in Gardiner, Montana, a town of about 800 people at the northern entrance to the park. The population was cut off for more than a day until Tuesday afternoon, when teams managed to reopen part of a razed two-lane road. Officials warned that driving conditions were still dangerous.
Although the floods cannot be directly attributed to climate change, they occurred when the midwest and east coast sank due to a heat wave and other parts of the west burned from an initial fire season. forest in the midst of a persistent drought that has increased the frequency and intensity of floods. fires that have wider impacts. Smoke from a fire in the mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona, could be seen in Colorado.
Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said a warming environment makes extreme weather events “more likely than they would have been without the warming caused by human activity.”
“Will Yellowstone repeat this in five or even 50 years’ time? Maybe not, but somewhere there will be something equivalent or even more extreme,” he said. “It was just this time last year that we were talking about the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. These extreme heat events are becoming more common. It’s not the same place every year. It won’t be the same place every year. “.
The towns of Cooke City and Silvergate, just east of the park, were also isolated by floodwaters.
Heavy rains on top of melting mountain snow pushed the Yellowstone, Stillwater and Clarks Fork rivers to record levels on Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
Officials in Yellowstone and several southern Montana counties were assessing the damage caused by the storms, which also caused mudslides and rockslides. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte declared a statewide disaster.
In Livingston, slums were evacuated and the city hospital was evacuated as a precaution after its road was flooded.
It was unclear how many visitors to the area were stranded or forced to leave Yellowstone, or how many people living outside the park were rescued and evacuated.
Some of the worst damage occurred in the northern part of the park and in the communities at the Yellowstone Gateway in southern Montana. Photos from the North Yellowstone National Park Service showed a landslide of mud, bridges and roads undermined by the floodwaters of the Gardner and Lamar rivers.
Park County officials, including Gardiner and Cooke City, said heavy flooding across the county had made drinking water unsafe in many areas.
The Montana National Guard said Monday it sent two helicopters to southern Montana to help with evacuations.
In south-central Montana, floodwaters on the Stillwater River stranded 68 people in a camp. Stillwater County Emergency Services agencies and teams with the Stillwater Mine rescued people Monday from Woodbine Camp in a raft. Some roads in the area are closed due to flooding and residents have been evacuated.
“We will assess the loss of housing and structures as the waters recede,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Cory Mottice, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Billings, Montana, said rain is not in the immediate forecast and that cooler temperatures will reduce snowmelt in the coming days.
“This is a flood we’ve never seen before in our lives,” Mottice said.
The Yellowstone River in Corwin Springs reached 13.88 feet (4.2 meters) on Monday, more than the previous record of 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) set in 1918, according to the National Weather Service.
In a Gardiner hut, Parker Manning had a close-up view of the rising water and the river bank draining into the Yellowstone River flooding right in front of his gate.
“We started to see whole trees floating down the river, rubble,” Manning, who is from Terra Haute, Indiana, told The Associated Press. “I saw a crazy kayaker coming down, who was a little crazy.”
On Monday evening, Manning saw running water undermine the opposite bank of the river, causing a house to fall into the river and float almost intact.
The floodwaters flooded Red Lodge Street, a 2,100-person Montana city that is a popular starting point for a scenic, winding route to Yellowstone. Twenty-five miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Joliet, Kristan Apodaca wiped away her tears as she stood in front of a demolished bridge, The Billings Gazette reported.
Her grandmother’s log cabin, which died in March, was flooded, as was the park where Apodaca’s husband proposed to her.
“I’m sixth generation. This is our home,” he said. “I literally drove that bridge yesterday. My mom drove it at 3 in the morning before it was washed.”
On Monday, Yellowstone officials evacuated the northern part of the park, where roads could remain impassable for a substantial amount of time, park superintendent Cam Sholly said in a statement.
But flooding also affected the rest of the park, and park officials warned of even greater flooding and potential problems with water supply and wastewater systems in developed areas.
The rains affected just when the hotels in the area have been filled with summer tourists in recent weeks. Last year the park had more than 4 million visitors. The wave of tourists does not subside until the fall and June is usually one of the busiest months in Yellowstone.
Yellowstone received 2.5 inches (6 inches) of rain on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The Beartooth Mountains northeast of Yellowstone reached 10 inches, according to the National Weather Service.
Video of a Southern Montana community near Yellowstone National Park shows Monday that a house fell into the Yellowstone River. Heavy rains and melting snow have caused flooding, damage and evacuation in and around the park.
The Associated Press
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