Swamp Creek Flooding Makes the Seattle Times
Posted by the Kenmore Crow | Filed under General | 1 Comment
The Seattle Times covers some of the effects of the rain here in Kenmore: Rivers recede, rain decreases as residents deal with the mess
In Kenmore, Frankie Schmitt found herself battling the worst floodwaters she has seen in 27 years.
Schmitt rented an extra sump pump Friday and asked the Kenmore Fire Department to bring out sandbags to help protect her property. But on Sunday, she said the water in her driveway was 4 feet deep and the garage from which she runs her machine-quilting shop was taking on water.
Nearby Swamp Creek often floods in the rain, and changes the city made recently to the street seemed to make it worse, she said. Beaver dams cause the high water to back up on her side of the creek, she said.
Based on my occasional observations, I’ve often suspected that Swamp Creek has flooded more often since they did all that work a few years ago that was supposed to help it flood less.
Here’s the location of the flooding mentioned in the article:
Read more on the Seattle Times Weather Beat blog.
Tags: Seattle Times, weather
Repeated Flooding & Buck-Passing Screws Kenmore Condo Complex
Posted by the Kenmore Crow | Filed under News | 2 Comments
Goodness, what a mess. This is one crow that is glad not to live too close to a stream or creek in Kenmore. Look at what one group of local residents have been going through with a city-owned culvert that has been flooding their homes for years. Here’s a sampling of articles on the problem:
- KOMO News, December 2007: Failed culvert pumps mud into Kenmore homes
- KOMO News, September 2009: Kenmore residents: Battle flooding culvert with no help, sandbags?
- Kenmore Undressed, September 2009: Kenmore Homeowners Are Getting Stiffed – A $50,000 Flooding Problem
- Kenmore Reporter, October 2009: Kenmore residents, city dealing with another potential Wild Cliff Shores flooding problem
- Kenmore Undressed, October 2009: Flooding at Wild Cliff Shores – Three Years Later and Still No Answers
Here’s an excerpt from the Kenmore Reporter story:
Arroyo has video showing water flowing throughout his back yard, reaching roughly up to his knees. In this instance, the Northshore Fire Department came to the rescue, he said, showing up at 2 a.m. to help put sandbags along the creek.
Those sandbags are still in place and Arroyo said residents have come to look on them as sort of an insurance policy against the creek. But Arroyo said the subdivision now faces a new problem. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has stated the bags represent an illegal altering of a fish-bearing stream, and as such, they have to go.
Arroyo added, to further complicate things, the state has said that while the subdivision needs a permit to put up the sandbags, they also need one to take them down. Both permits cost money and, reportedly, neither is easily obtained.
In the long run, in order to keep the sandbags in place and possibly make other alterations to the creek such as removing silt build-up, Wild Cliff might have to do an environmental study with a price tag of $50,000 to $70,000, money Arroyo said the homeowners just don’t have.
UM… WHAT?
Welcome to Kenmore, Washington – a.k.a. Bizarro World.
Here’s a Bizarro World pop quiz.
Q: What do you get when you bring the City of Kenmore and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife together to solve a flooding problem that has been affecting homeowners for three years?
A: This:
“In an ideal world, with these studies, in the next year or two, there will be some solutions to the problems that affect us all.”
That’s a quote from Kenmore City Manager Frederick Stouder. In Stouder’s “ideal world” it takes four or five years to solve a repeated flooding issue that is causing significant property damage and costing people money over and over again.
I’m speechless.
Tags: central-kenmore, flooding, Kenmore-Undressed, KOMO, Real Estate, Stouder, weather
