I wouldn't call it freakish, although some years are worse than others. High winds, usually associated with storms, are pretty common periodically through late fall and winter. The geography of the area, combined with repeated storm fronts coming off the ocean, produce a wind tunnel effect through the Straights of Juan de Fuca and then generally southward through the Puget Sound basin. Whatcom county, being at the apex of these points, generally gets a pretty fair dose of winds. Something similar happens at the southern end of the Olympics but in a northerly direction. Where the two windstreams meet is what is referred to as the convergence zone.

But there are typically several pretty good blows every winter :-) For a while there were repeated occurrences right around Thanksgiving, knocking out power over widespread areas and challenging folks to some pretty creative ways to cook their turkeys. It got to be a bit of joke, with people routinely planning alternate means of celebration just in case the wind caused power outages again.

Windstorms, with downed trees, flying garbage cans, closed bridges and loss of power are just as much a fact of a PNW winter as is the rain.

I'm new to PNW also, although I'm down near Portland, and have also been wondering about the wind. That's my thread about Troutdale - will the wind be too much? I knew about the rain and I actually have liked it so far, but I didn't know about the high winds.

Do people have generators here, as backups for the electricity? Or just burn candles when the lights go out?

What about using bushes as wind breaks around the garden plot? It's interesting to move somewhere new and learn how to cope with peculiarities of the area. Or even thrive with them.

We just burn candles, doesn't happen too often that the lights go out. Some people do have generators although I don't know anyone personally who does. A lot of homes have some sort of wood heat here. We don't. Have never been without power for more than a few hours.

Wind this year is normal in the Portland area. I have always lived near The Gorge; Gresham, SE Portland so don't know what the wind is like in other parts of Portland. I know Wilsonville which is south on I5 is very windy, worked there for 9 years.

We had extra rain in November though.

Also recently arrived here from MN, what has surprised me is how easily the trees seem to break up in the wind, mostly Douglas fir but other species as well. On three occasions this "fall" (pun intended) I've witnessed massive branches drop from trees while walking my dog and I'm constantly picking up 100 lb plus limbs in my garden.

Almost seems like branches with weak attachments have been building up and waiting for the perfect storm(s) to bring them down.

It's not typical compared to what I grew up with, at least not the 50+ mph winds several times a year. The Columbus day storm was the worst I went through. We'd often have storms come through with 30-40 mph winds.
We've been having some pretty strong gusts this afternoon, causing the big firs to twist and sway. Schizac, if you watch a big fir in the wind, you'll see why the limbs come down. They get whipped around a lot and are long branches and some of them just crack under the pressure and go down. We had one go down on our pickup one year and it left a sizable dent in the cab. Good thing it's an old truck! My dh traded our old van to get the dent out, so that worked out pretty well.

I live north of Portland, and have lived up here for 13 years. In 1995 we had high winds that came after the ground was totally saturated with water, and had a number of crowded trees fall over with their roots ripped out of the ground, and a couple of trees break off. We haven't had more than a few branches break off since until yesterday when winds got as high as 79 mph and 2-3 trees broke off and fell, fortunately only hitting one of my tree hazels. Most branches were broken off but the trunk itself seems at least to still be standing. It was perhaps 12 years old but not as big as the other one planted at the same time.

I'm wondering if changing global weather is causing higher winds as in worse hurricanes, tornadoes, and wind storms, as predicted in Revelations.

Hemnancy, I had heard 65 was our highest gust, where did you hear 79? Just curious.
We had a big fir go down and a couple of alders and a large piece of a maple broke off, plus lots of limbs. We always have limbs down with the windstorms, mostly from the maples. Ice storms have taken a lot of limbs down in the past.
I was glad when things died down last night.
Then today we had rain, sleet, hail, snow and sun. Crazy! I look forward to some calmer days ahead. We'll need some to clean up the mess and figure out what we're going to do with the huge hole alongside our road, some of which went with the tree. Hope everyone else came through it ok.

I have lived here 57 years and yes you can expect high winds both in the fall and the spring most years in the Northwest. Some years are worst than others. The worst was the Columbus Day Storm of 1962. I was living on the coast of Washington and we had sustained winds of over eighty mph with gust from 120 to over 150 mph. That was the year when timber companies discovered they could sell logs to Japan and make more money than mill them here, because there were so many downed trees their mills couldn't handle the numbers.

Last nights storm was strong and you can probably expect one like it every five to ten years. I know that I have seen plenty like it growing up and living on the coast.

I heard that Aberdeen had gust over ninety mph last night for those wondering if there were winds greater than seventy.

I think I'm reassured. Sounds like 30 - 40 mph is a more normal windstorm, which I can live with, having moved here from the Great Plains. (You don't do tornadoes here much, right??) Two storms with gusts over 80 mph within a month, I was starting to worry. So forget the brittle trees and plant some windbreak-like plantings to protect the more fragile low stuff and I should do OK.

Yes, we do tornadoes here. Not like you get in the Great Plains, but every year we get several small ones that take roofs off and throw cars off the road. With our hilly terrian, they don't stay on the ground long either. The Nation Weather Service's history web site says that either in the 1970's or 1980's, (I forget now) that Washington state in that decade had more tornado deaths than the rest of the nation combined.

We also have volcanoes, five active ones in Washington State. I hope you don't live close to Mt. Baker or the Nooksack River if that volcano decides to go. Then there are the huge floods we get every year and as more and more people move here and live in the flood plains there will be more and more damage and deaths from these floods.

Oh, I almost forgot, we get thousands of earthquakes a year in the Northwest. Most are not felt because they are so deep, but every ten or so years we get one close enough to the surface to damage buildings and kill people. We are also long overdue for the big one off the coast that could be as powerful as 9 or 10 on the scale. If you are still living here when that one happens, the disaster will be huge, making what happened in New Orleans seem like a picnic. Be prepared to be isolated and without power for a long, long time, if you survive the quake.

The moral of this is that no matter where you go, you can't get away from natural disasters, just be prepared as best you can.

There was a small tornado around here yesterday, to add to the mix.
I grew up in the Willamette Valley, so that's the weather I was referring to, no comparison to coastal weather. Wind is a given along the coast.
Today is very calm and frosty. I'll be cleaning up our tree mess on our neighbor's property, not that they expect me to.
Enjoy the calm!

Yesterday was bright, sunny, and calm after about mid-morning. I even got out and marked out the outline for a small raised vegetable bed for spring. Now I've just got the get my DH to help put the posts in. I've told him that can be my Christmas present this year. Maybe it'll work - maybe.

Another interesting fact of this area: you can get different weather systems within 1/4 mile of each other. The mountains funnel winds down certain valleys and a small mountain will protect another property. Until the wind comes from a different direction. Our property seems to be fairly protected from most winds, but it isn't a sun or heat trap and we don't have any place that is "early" in the springtime. We have been lucky with the winds this winter and have just lost small branches and have a general mess. When we see pics of other places, we count ourselves very lucky!

Ratherbgardening- I was just going by the TV weather report figures, I don't know where in Vancouver they do the testing. The highest number on the board was for Salem with 90 mph. The typical news hour temperatures here are for the Portland airport so are usually higher than where I live at more elevation. There's probably lots of local variations because of hills, mountains, etc. anyway.

I'm just happy no trees fell on our house or cars, and that the tree that fell missed one of my little Daphnes by a few feet. We're not looking forward to having to cut the tree up. At least when a lot fell at once we got a logger to cut them up and haul them away on a logging truck and even pay us for the logs, but we had to deal with all the branches even then.

It just depends on what station you listen to I guess.
I too am glad no trees came down on our house. We have a cedar on the south side of our house that we worry about with the big storms, but so far so good. It's probably only 60' tall, approx., so it's not heavy at the top.
We're considering having a logger take the big fir if they'd come for just one tree. They'd get 4 logs out of it and it's at least 40 years old. If not, then it's firewood.
Enjoy the sun today everyone!

We have red cedars around our house in any direction. At least solitary ones seem to have good root systems. When they have grown up crowded like in a wood they tend to have rather small root systems for the height of the tree, at least they can fall over and uproot 10-12' circles of roots. I guess if winds get consistently bad we could consider having all of the logged, then I wouldn't be fighting their root systems all the time but we would lose a lot of shade, which is kind of nice to work in on a hot day.

I would have to say the wind was minor here on the north end of SSI. Power stayed on and the highest wind speed I recorded was only 52 kmph . More breezy than anything here, but other areas to the south in Victoria and into Washington state got nailed pretty bad. Areas on the lower mainland got hit hard as well. The worst winds missed us here on SSI. We are quite sheltered here in the inner Southern Gulf Islands, Joe

There are still numerous areas with pockets of power outages around here - fallen trees or parts of trees are visible everywhere, as are downed fences.

I've lived in this area my entire life and don't remember winds locally as strong as this last storm and that includes the Columbus Day storm. I was working in downtown Seattle in my former corporate life during the Inaguration Day storm and recall numerous flying objects wreaking havoc on any pedestrians that happened to be out, as well as windows blowing out, etc. One gust of wind literally picked me up and threw me against a plate glass storefront window, cracking the window and producing a massive bruise on my shoulder. I had the good sense to stay indoors during this storm :-)

I think the Columbus Day Storm was more severe in Southern Washington and Oregon. To me the incredible amount of blowdown in the forests with that event suggests that was still our worst storm in recorded history.

The highest wind gust I heard about with this one was 135mph at Mission Ridge.

My parents have a massive, 100' redwood south of their house.... It's still standing for now, but I wonder if it should be removed. On the other hand, if it can live through this it ought to live through anything (???)

Oh and the power is still out.

This storm was really hit and miss depending on where you were. We usually get it pretty good up on Kent's East Hill but this time was so-so. We did lose power at 11:30 PM but it was back at 8:30 the next morning. I was more worried about my Koi than I was about us. We were whining because even though we had power our cable was out :-) My mom is only 10 minutes away and had a doug fir drop on a snowmobile and a car and was without power till Sunday. We went to several nurseries out toward Maple Valley and Black Diamond yesterday and the damage was quite extensive in that neck of the woods.

Redwoods and ginkgoes generally held up well to the Great Gale of October, 1987 in England--unlike many other kinds of trees. The native California coastal habitat of the coast redwood is also very windy, yet groves of them stand there for centuries (where not logged), sometimes the first tall things right behind the beach.

Yes, I'm not to worried about the redwood for now... I have heard of Sequoiadendron coming down but such trees probably had other problems.

Still waiting for the power to come back on...

All kinds of redwoods did well in Great Gale. These ancient, monumental trees aren't going to let a little wind bother them. Here our native western red cedar (Thuja plicata) reaches huge size on the outer coast by resisting fierce storms that sometimes blow down all the smaller trees around them. As a rule the remaining big ones have candelabra tops, from having the upper part of the trunk snapped by wind, so even these aged survivors do not experience such events unscathed.