Pacific Storms

Flooding may be worst in 50 years in the Snohomish River valley in Washington State. The whole Northwest coast has been getting quite the storms. A riverbank collapsed. People stranded. Highways closed.

West Side flooding causes evacuations, voting trouble. Handey said that in Cowlitz County, election officials worked with the sheriff’s office to reach stranded voters to deliver ballots and get votes in.

We may not have seen the worst yet. A Pineapple Express — a tropical jet stream from Hawaii that moved across the eastern Pacific, gathering moisture before unloading in the mountainous Northwest — is being blamed for the deluge that is causing flooding much earlier than usual. Typically, January and February are the worst months for flooding.

Recently - Heavy weather that battered North Korea's eastern coast in late October left more than 7,300 people homeless, an international aid group said Tuesday, but no deaths were reported due to a successfully functioning early warning system.

The storms from Oct. 21-23 caused tidal waves that struck North Korea's Kangwon province, destroying or partially destroying 732 houses and flooding 366 others, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.

Yesterday a tornado hit Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan resulting in 9 deaths. Though tornadoes are very rare in Japan, the country's Meteorological Agency said that the worst tornado hit Japan two months ago, when three people were killed on the southern island of Kyushu.