Crews use sandbags to shore up breach in levee near Seattle after failure prompts flood warning

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, an official said.

The evacuation order from King County in Washington state covered homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of Kent, Renton and Tukwila. 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.

Authorities in two of those cities — Renton and Tukwila — said Monday afternoon the flooding was confined to small, industrial areas and that no residents were being evacuated.

The spokesperson for the city of Renton, Laura Pettitt, said the breach was minimal and was being addressed by sandbagging, including the use of large bags, about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and filled with 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.”

In Tukwila, the flooding occurred in a “very small” industrial part of the city that does not have any residential areas, police spokesperson Victor Masters said.

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 Briscoe Desimone levee adjacent to the Green River. A section of paved bike path along the top of the levee in Tukwila cratered and broke where the levee washed away underneath it.

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.

Last Tuesday, crews began construction work to install what they called a seepage blanket — a permeable material that can remove water from a cut slope — in an effort to reduce the flood risk for more than 30,000 people in Tukwila, Kent, and Renton, according to the county Department of Natural Resources.

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 work was to be completed by Dec. 30, 2015, though it wasn’t immediately clear when the repairs were 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.