Photo: CTV News
More than 10,000 visitors were ordered to leave Yellowstone as an unprecedented flood devastated the northern half of the country’s oldest national park, washing bridges and roads and sweeping a staff booth miles downstream, they said. officials Tuesday. Surprisingly, no injuries or deaths were reported.
The only visitors left in the huge park straddling three states were a dozen campers still coming from inside.
The park, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, could remain closed for up to a week, and northern entrances may not reopen this summer, Superintendent Cam Sholly said.
“The water is still raging,” said Sholly, who said more wet weather was expected this weekend that could cause additional flooding.
Floods hit historic levels in the Yellowstone River after days of rain and rapid melting snow and wreaked havoc on parts of southern Montana and northern Wyoming, where they ravaged huts, flooded small towns, cut off ‘electricity and flooded houses. He arrived at the park just as the summer tourist season was on its way, attracting millions of visitors.
Instead of marveling at the site of grizzlies and bison, the bubbling hot springs and the steady explosion of the Old Faithful Geyser, tourists found themselves witnessing nature at its most unpredictable time along the Yellowstone River. it crested in a chocolate brown torrent that carried away anything in its path.
“It’s just the scariest river in history,” Kate Gomez of Santa Fe, New Mexico said Tuesday. “Everything that falls into the river is gone.”
Although no one was killed or injured, the waters began to recede on Tuesday and the full extent of the destruction was unknown.
Sholly said the backpackers who remained in the park had been contacted. The crews were ready to be evacuated by helicopter, but that has not yet been necessary, he said.
Sholly added that he did not believe the park had ever been closed due to flooding.
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 city was cut off for more than a day until Tuesday afternoon, when teams reopened part of a devastated two-lane road.
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.
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.
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.
At Red Lodge, Montana, a city of 2,100 people that is a popular starting point for a scenic and winding route to Yellowstone, a stream that runs through the city jumped its banks and flooded the main thoroughfare, leaving omelettes. swimming on the street a day later. under sunny skies.
Residents described a gruesome scene where water passed from a drip to a torrent in a matter of hours.
The water dropped telephone poles, tore down fences and cut deep cracks in the ground through a neighborhood of hundreds of houses. Electricity was cut off but restored on Tuesday, although there was still no running water in the affected neighborhood.
Heidi Hoffman left early Monday to buy a tank bomb in Billings, but when she returned, her basement was full of water.
“We’ve lost all our belongings in the basement,” Hoffman said as the pump removed a steady stream of water from his muddy backyard. “Yearbooks, images, clothes, furniture. We would be cleaning for a long time. “
On Monday, Yellowstone officials evacuated the northern part of the park, where roads could remain impassable for a substantial amount of time, 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 doesn’t slow down until the fall, and June is usually one of the busiest months in Yellowstone.
It was unclear how many visitors to the region were stranded, or how many people living outside the park were rescued and evacuated.
Mark Taylor, owner and chief pilot of Rocky Mountain Rotors, said his company had flown about 40 paying customers over the past two days from Gardiner, including two women who were “very pregnant.”
Taylor spoke while transporting a family of four adults from Texas, who wanted to do a little more sightseeing before returning home.
“I imagine they’re going to rent a car and they’re going to see other parts of Montana, in a drier place,” he said.
In a Gardiner hut, Parker Manning of Terre Haute, Indiana, had a close-up view of the Yellowstone River flooding right in front of his door. Whole trees and even a lone kayak floated.
In the early hours of the evening, he recorded a video while the water was eating on the opposite bank where a large brown house that had been the home of the park employees, who had been evacuated, was precariously lined up.
In a loud noise over the roar of the river, the house fell into the water and was swept away by the current. Sholly said it floated 5 miles (8 kilometers) before sinking.
In south-central Montana, floodwaters on the Stillwater River stranded 68 people in a camp. Stillwater County Emergency Services Agency and Stillwater Mine crew rescued people Monday from Woodbine Camp in a raft. Some roads in the area were closed and neighbors were evacuated.
The sheriff’s office said it would assess the damage when the waters receded.
The towns of Cooke City and Silvergate, just east of the park, were also isolated by floodwaters.
In Livingston, slum residents were told to leave and the city hospital was evacuated as a precaution after its road was flooded.
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 Nye Village, at least four huts were dragged into the Stillwater River, Shelley Blazina said, including one she had.
“It was my sanctuary,” he said Tuesday. “I was shocked yesterday. I’m very sad today. “
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.
Yellowstone received 2.5 inches (6 inches) of rain on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The Beartooth Mountains northeast of Yellowstone reached 10 centimeters, according to the National Weather Service.