TUKWILA, Wash. (AP) — Crews used sandbags to shore up an earthen levee south of Seattle on Monday after a small section of it failed following a week of heavy rains, prompting an evacuation order covering parts of three suburbs, officials said.
The evacuation order from King County in Washington state was sent to about 1,100 homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of Kent, Renton and Tukwila, said Brendan McCluskey, the county’s emergency management director. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning that initially covered nearly 47,000 people, but was reduced within a few hours to an area covering 7,000 people.
No one was injured, McCluskey said.
Authorities in Renton and Tukwila said Monday afternoon that the flooding was confined to small, industrial areas and that no residents were being evacuated.
The levee breach followed days of heavy rain and flooding that inundated communities, forced the evacuations of tens of thousands of people and prompted scores of rescues throughout western Washington state.
The failure occurred on the Desimone levee beside the Green River, in an area where officials had been concerned about a possible breach, John Taylor, director of the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, said at a news conference Monday.
With high water levels in the past week, workers began installing a “seepage blanket” — a permeable material that can remove water from a cut slope — in an effort to reduce the flood risk, and crews were present Monday when the breach occurred.
“We were there because we are monitoring these levees closely,” Taylor said. “It’s just not typical to have these levees have this much water behind them for this long. They’re getting saturated and they’re starting to show the effects of that.”
The spokesperson for the city of Renton, Laura Pettitt, said the breach was minimal and was being filled with sandbags, including large ones about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and holding about a ton of sand.
“What we understand is that the area is being managed and the breach has been controlled,” she said. “However, that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be future impact with any changing situation.”
A section of paved bike path along the top of the levee in Tukwila cratered and broke where the levee washed away beneath it.
Reid Wolcott, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the flash flood warning was initially issued for a “rather large area because we didn’t know specifically which areas would flood.”
“We have since refined the initial alerting area to a much smaller area, and we will continue to refine that alert as we learn more information on the potential impacts,” he said.
The levee was badly damaged during flooding in 2020. Long-term repairs were not expected to be completed until 2031, according to a blog post from the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks.
In August 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began repairs to a 775-foot-long (235-meter) segment of the levee, as the result of flooding in March 2014, according to the federal agency. The damage significantly impacted the levee’s ability to protect an area of about 7.5 square miles (19 square kilometers). The repairs were to be completed by the end of 2015, though it wasn’t immediately clear when work concluded.
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This story has been corrected to show that the three cities affected were Tukwila, Kent and Renton, rather than Tukwila, Kent and Auburn.
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Rush reported from Portland, Oregon. Associated Press writer Christopher L. Keller contributed from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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