Strong winds downed trees and rattled windows in Washington State as a storm system with hurricane-force winds hit the region overnight, forcing some train cancellations and leaving nearly 550,000 customers without power as of Wednesday morning. The authorities said at least one person had been killed.
A powerful atmospheric river, a band of moisture that flows from the Pacific Ocean, was hovering above the Northwest early Wednesday. That moisture, combined with a bomb cyclone off the coast of Oregon and Washington — so-called because it quickly dropped in atmospheric pressure over a short period — is expected to bring damaging winds, life-threatening flooding and large ocean waves to a wide stretch of the Northwest this week.
Washington State and parts of Western Canada felt the initial impacts on Tuesday night.
Some areas of Washington State received wind gusts of up to 77 miles per hour, the National Weather Service said. Hurricane-strength winds begin at 74 m.p.h. The agency urged drivers to stay off the roads, saying that strong winds were expected until about 4 a.m. local time and could cause widespread power outages.
A woman in her 50s was killed after a large tree fell on a homeless encampment in Lynnwood, Wash., the local fire department said.
In Seattle, a person was rescued after a tree fell onto their vehicle, the fire department said.
About 650,000 electricity customers in the state had no power earlier on Wednesday, according to the site poweroutage.us. The outages affected radio transmissions at the Weather Service’s Seattle office, the agency said.
The same weather system began drenching the Bay Area and parts of Northern California with heavy rain overnight, and is expected to continue into the weekend. More than a month’s worth of precipitation could fall over the next three to four days, forecasters said.
The Weather Service issued winter storm and blizzard warnings in and around the Cascade Mountains, and storm warnings off the coast. Those warnings were set to expire early Wednesday.
Parts of Oregon and Northern California were also under high wind and winter storm warnings early Wednesday. Parts of Northern California were under a flood watch until Friday evening. Forecasters said heavy snow that could make travel difficult to impossible was expected in the higher elevations of Northern California on Wednesday.
Amtrak announced that it had canceled several trains running between Seattle, Oakland, Portland and Spokane through Thursday.
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