SEATTLE — It is possible to have rain — lots of it — and still be plagued by drought.
Just look at tiny Forks, which bills itself as the wettest town in the contiguous United States. As of Thursday, 26.6 inches of rain had fallen on the Olympic Peninsula hamlet since Jan. 1, nearly twice what Los Angeles averages in an entire year.
And yet on Friday, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee declared droughts on the Olympic Peninsula, which has three separate rainforests; on the east side of the Central Cascade Mountains, Washington’s answer to Central Valley agriculture; and in the Walla Walla region, the state’s main wine country.
Because there’s drought, and then there’s drought.
“What we’re experiencing is essentially a snowpack drought,” Maia Bellon, director of the state Department of Ecology, said Friday. “As of this very moment, the projected snowpack is 4 percent of normal in the Olympic Mountains.”