WASHINGTON — On the morning of Friday, Nov. 13, 1981, 45 years ago today, a weather satellite captured a swirl of clouds tightening roughly 500 miles off the Oregon and Northern California coast.
Compared to today’s sharp satellite imagery, the fuzzy black-and-white image seems archaic, but it clearly showed a monster storm in the making.
Within 24 hours, the storm would become the strongest windstorm to hit the Puget Sound region since the legendary Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
It became known as the “Friday the 13th Windstorm.”
The offshore low-pressure system strengthened at an incredible rate. Fueled by powerful winds high in the atmosphere estimated at around 180 mph, the storm’s central pressure plunged roughly 50 millibars in just 24 hours, more than double the rate of strengthening that would qualify for bombogenesis, or what we often call a “bomb cyclone.”
Computer models back then were far more primitive than the ones we use today, and the available forecast data significantly underestimated how quickly the storm would strengthen. The low also remained well offshore as it intensified before racing north along the coast.
By the time the full strength of the storm became apparent, there wasn’t much time to prepare.
The Oregon coast took the brunt of the storm’s most extreme winds, with gusts topping 90 mph in some locations and reportedly reaching 100 to 120 mph in a few exposed areas.
Strong southerly winds came roaring up the Interstate 5 corridor Friday night into Saturday morning, Nov. 14.
Peak recorded gusts included:
- Hoquiam: 70 mph
- Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: 67 mph
- Olympia: 64 mph
- Renton: 56 mph
Roughly 400,000 homes and businesses lost power, with widespread outages stretching along the I-5 corridor from Southwest Washington into the Puget Sound region and north toward the Canadian border.
There were 11 fatalities in Washington and Oregon attributed to the storm.
Winds were so strong on Lake Washington that the old Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, better known today as the SR 520 bridge, was closed for about 11 hours as steep waves pounded the structure and caused damage.
But there was another memorable event happening in Seattle that Saturday afternoon.
The University of Washington Huskies took on USC at Husky Stadium. Battling strong winds and heavy rain squalls, the Huskies beat the Trojans 13-3, undoubtedly in front of plenty of soaked fans!
Just as the area was recovering, another strong storm moved in on Sunday, Nov. 15. This second storm wasn’t quite as powerful, but gusts of 50 to 60 mph were enough to bring down more trees and limbs already weakened by the first storm, slowing power restoration into the following week.
The “Friday the 13th Windstorm” would remain the storm many in Western Washington remembered as the benchmark for more than a decade, until the Inauguration Day Storm struck in January 1993.
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