Ellis Lucia’s The Big Blow: The Story of the Pacific Northwest's Columbus Day Storm chronicles the catastrophic 1962 extratropical cyclone that violently reshaped the region's physical and cultural landscape. The gripping narrative maps the storm's devastating trajectory as it roared northward from the coast, tearing through the fertile Willamette Valley of Oregon and battering the densely populated Puget Sound corridor of Washington. Lucia details the unprecedented destruction inflicted upon coastal timberlands and inland agricultural basins, extending its fury all the way into the coastal communities of southern British Columbia to leave billions of board feet of shattered forests in its wake. By documenting the widespread infrastructural collapse across these interconnected states and provinces, the book captures the terrifying vulnerability of the broader Pacific Northwest geography to extreme oceanic weather systems.

Pacific Northwest, Storms, Storms Northwest, Pacific

Map on p. [3] of cover

Map on p. [3] of cover