The Chehalis River has always been a working river and a legendary one, and its story is braided together with water, memory, and the stubbornness of people who keep rebuilding in a floodplain that never forgets.
Long river, long memory
The Chehalis Basin spreads across about 2,700 square miles of Southwest Washington, draining hills and forests before emptying into Grays Harbor and the Pacific. For thousands of years, Native peoples along the river told stories about periods when the water rose suddenly, reshaped the banks, and carved new channels, treating the big floods as part warning, part reminder that the river was alive.
Early recorded floods
When settlers arrived and towns like Centralia and Chehalis grew up on the valley floor, they built railroads, mills, and homes on ground the river had already claimed before. By the late 1800s, newspapers were already documenting major winter floods—like December 1887—when heavy rains after a dry summer turned streets into waterways, stopped trains, and took lives, proving early that this river could not be treated as a simple drainage ditch.
A pattern through the 1900s
Through the 1900s, the pattern repeated: fall and winter storms, sometimes with a warm rain-on-snow event, would send the Chehalis and its tributaries—Newaukum, Skookumchuck, Satsop and Wynoochee—over their banks. Floods in 1933, 1937, 1972, 1986, and 1990 shut roads, closed schools, and turned farm fields and fairgrounds into temporary lakes, while residents used boats to reach neighborhoods and local airports disappeared under brown water.
The era of “100‑year” floods
In the late 20th and early 21st century, the Chehalis entered what locals started calling the age of the “hundred‑year flood”—except they kept coming about every few years. Major basin‑wide events in 1990, 1996, 2007, 2009, and again in 2022 pushed the river to or above the level used by FEMA to draw the official floodplain maps, repeatedly closing Interstate 5 and costing farmers, small towns, and the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
December 2007: when the freeway drowned
The December 3, 2007 flood is now part of local lore, the kind of story people mark time by—“before the flood” and “after the flood.” A series of Pacific storms, including the Great Coastal Gale, dumped upwards of 20 inches of rain in parts of the upper basin in just a couple of days, sending a wall of water downstream that shut I‑5 near Chehalis for days, drowned thousands of acres of farmland, and caused an estimated 900 million dollars in damage.
Living with a restless river
Today, the Chehalis River’s story is still being written by people trying to live with a river that refuses to stay put. Flood authorities, tribes, farmers, towns, and the state argue over levees, warning systems, and proposed flood‑retention dams, even as climate projections suggest that the kind of big floods that used to be rare may become more frequent, forcing every generation along the Chehalis to decide again how close to build to a river that remembers its old paths.
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