So, as I mentioned here earlier, we're fine despite the heavy flooding in the region (up on a hill and all that). My office park was flooded out, but that returned to normal quickly. One car left in the parking lot beneath the building over the weekend was flooded (water over the bottom of the door). And walking around the property, there is a lot of new islands and heavy silt clogging up parts of the canal (which means it needs to be dredged, or else we're more likely to see repeats).
Not everyone in the region is so fortunate. Woodinville, just north of where Shelly in Seattle lives, took a hard hit, and people were flooded out of their homes. And I-5 itself is flooded down by Chehalis, about an hour south of us. (You're looking at the bridge OVER I-5 in that shot). I-5 is one of the two major highways into the region (The other being I-90, over the passes, which are sporadic as the winter months set in and closed by avalanches). So there is already a bit of tightness in supplies getting into the region.
And in the midst of this, I started wondering about the levees in Auburn, Kent, and Renton. The Green River was channeled a few decades back, and the surrounding region has been heavily developed since. A little digging came up with this, detailing how King County got a major chunk of restoration work done right before the storm hit. I'm still digging to see what else I can come up with, but so far it seems that the levees down here are holding.
Interestingly enough, the week before the storm, there was this article and others of its stripe about FEMA's expanding the definition of the floodplain along the Green and elsewhere, cast in terms of "Oh, big government, is evil, keeping us from developing our land". Has anyone gone back there recently to see if there is any standing water on those properties now?
More later,
