From the desk of Susan Hutchison, candidate for King County Executive:
I want to talk to you today about the most serious and immediate threat to the region’s economy and well being—floods along the Green River resulting from problems at the Howard Hansen Dam. I have said for two months that we need to be working 24/7 to shore up the levees to prevent the disaster. Today I suggest we call up the Marines!
The Howard Hanson Dam (which has its own Twitter page) is located in south King County. It was dedicated in 1962 and built to prevent flooding of the lowland areas of Auburn, Kent, Tukwila, and Renton. But now the dam is steadily leaking, and it can’t store as much water as it used to, which may precipitate flooding.
Back to Hutchison:
Thousands of businesses are located there, including the Boeing Commercial Airplane company headquarters. The lowlands are home to 30,000 residents including senior and low-cost housing. The county, Boeing and other businesses are spending millions to protect their assets, and people who can, are moving to higher ground. But as we saw with Katrina, the poor and vulnerable will suffer the most.
Hutchison, who places priorities with the poor and the vulnerable, lays out a bullet-point plan on how to address the issue, a list that includes:
Asking for military assistance from Fort Lewis-based units, calling for volunteers from the area to prepare for flooding, and, to lobby the Governor and our D.C. delegation to get us the cash to fix the dam.
Hutchison attacks Constantine, too: “My opponent, who is chair of the County Council, says he’s been in meetings since May. But we what we need is action!”
Meetings! He’s been in meetings! Meetings about the damn dam! You mean, like this meeting?
Spent the morning with the Army Corps Colonel and at the Howard Hanson Dam. Good progress. Now at the flood prep meeting in Kent. BIG crowd.
Huh. Sometime meetings can be good, too.
There are no Marines stationed at Ft. Lewis, dipshit…
One more thing that she just doesn’t get about government.
Earth to Susie: the military is just a trifle overextended just now, you know, what with Afghanistan and Iraq and everyone being on their 3000th tour and all.
What DOES make sense is to do something akin to the CCC and do it quickly: hire the unemployed for $12/hour to fill and stack sandbags and shore up levees.
Good point, Geni.
Although one wonders why we ever let people buy residential property for other than agricultural or industrial usage in a flood plain …. and then subsidized their flood insurance.
Maybe Susan H can operate a Brain Trust with Clarence Thomas.
i can’t help noting that development in the green river/kent valley wasn’t practical till a dam was thrown together to stop nature from making river bottoms functions as designed.
now its covered with acres upon acres of warehouses and impervious parking lots, so a flood would be much worse than it would have been before the howard hanson dam was built.
Even if there WERE marines @ Ft Lewis – King County can’t, like, “call up” military units. They work for the feds. Governors can mobilize the National Guard. Which is the Army.
@5 welcome to the industrial revolution.
@5, it used to flood every year or two. That’s WHY it was farmland in the first place.
If L’il Susie gets elected, don’t worry; the administrative staff of the county will take charge, and she’ll probably serve out her entire term without realizing that her Hot Line Telephone isn’t attached to anything.
LOL, @8 for the win. But her hot line phone will be hot pink.
Sure is funny how “conservatives” don’t give a shit about the Posse Comitatus Act anymore.
could this woman actually get elected? what the hell is she saying?
colonel wright and the army corps of engineers is actually doing a purdy good job and repairs are moving quickly. county officials have been moving on this as well as state and feds. chances are only 4 in 1 that water would be released into the green river. and there is substantial work going on in the kent and auburn to prevent the river from overflowing. there is actually quite a bit of good coordinated work being done. responsible messaging must point out to people to be prepared, and the chances of flooding is very real, but dont freak the population out and try to make politics out of this.
@3 aren’t all those vets of the wars coming home now and looking for jobs?
No, they’re still stuck there.
In fact, if the neocons get their way, we’ll be fighting in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
And at this point – for far longer than we fought World War II.
Bring em home.
Someone should tell her it’s Hanson, not Hansen. This press release is full of competence.
Your post today has desperation written all over it. It demonstrates again you have nothing to say and can’t write.
@11 is correct…
I’ve been involved in the planning efforts – and news flash for Susan they already involve the County, municipalities, utilities, private companies, and Feds. Also, there has been levee work going on since last year, constantly. And the valley communities have passed temp permitting language to make it easier for businesses to protect their property from water damage and been working directly with businesses to get them prepped.
So she wants to pretend there is a crisis (nothing is being done! no action!) and then take credit for the ongoing preparations??? Fuck that. I hope she dies in a fire before the election.
The Stranger is in big-time secular decline, and the hiring of racist Will Kelley-Kamp, and the firing of Jonah Spangenthal-Lee are indicative of that decline.
Lol @ 17, did I miss something? I hope so
The headline cracks me up.
typically the marines come in after a disaster has already hit or is underway.
but it’s not a city or county that calls them up.
preople really want this dipshit to win?
christ…
Regarding the Slog post, it’s not completely descriptive to say that the leaking Howard Hanson Dam would “precipitate” flooding– it’s more that Colonel Anthony Wright of the Army Corps of Engineers is going to let the water go from behind the dam, deliberately flooding the Green River Valley, in order to protect the dam from failing entirely until it’s fixed.
The fact that it would be a flood caused by a government entity matters because it voids some private flood insurance. It also means that Colonel Wright would be able to give a warning before he turns on the taps and causes the flood, time for evacuation, if it is well planned.
@4: Unfortunately, the newly projected flood inundation zone of Auburn, Kent, Tukwila and Renton wasn’t considered a “flood plain” after the dam went in. Maybe it still should have been, because people mortgages on houses and businesses there would have been required to carry flood insurance. And maybe the valley wouldn’t have lost all of that farmland to the blight of warehouses.
@11: Colonol Wright’s latest estimate puts the chance of castastrophic flooding of the Green River at 1 in 4, not 4 in 1.
Susan Hutchinson is clearly a nutter, but there is a small kernel of truth to her misinformed ranting. I went to public flood preparedness meeting at GRCC of about 800 people, and the message from the assembled officials was basically to buy flood insurance, make an emergency kit, and to sign up your phone number to be robo-called in case of evacuation.
The officials patted themselves on the back for all of the extra work they had been doing, and all the of the meetings they had been having with each other.
They had not yet come up with evacuation routes or evacuation locations. They could have used the meeting to inform people of these things.
There was no coordinated plan to deal with and empty all of the underground oil and gas tanks in the area. There needs to be a toxins evacuation plan, starting now.
They had no defined plan of where to send evacuees. They mentioned maybe the Tacoma Dome. That sounds like it will turn out well.
They had no plan to send people door to door, or in cars with loudspeakers through neighborhoods to warn of imminent flooding. So if you lost your cell phone, or you don’t hear it ringing, or your cell phone battery is dead, or your phone is off because you didn’t pay the bill, or you’re a heavy sleeper and you miss your robocall, too bad.
Someone suggested they put up sirens on poles to warn people of flooding so they could evacuate, but the officials said there wasn’t time. The citizen’s response was that there is 3-5 years of flooding danger, plenty of time.
They had no defined plan to send people to help the elderly and disabled to evacuate, and didn’t even acknowledge this as an official responsibility of something government entities could/should be helping with. Their message was all about personal responsibility.
This is where Hutchinson’s idea of “send in the Marines” starts to sound not so crazy. Some people in the flood zone will have planned ahead and found a place to go, kept gas in their car, have their emergency kit purchased and packed, get their robocall and go. Some won’t. It could be because they’re elderly or disabled, or don’t have a car, or haven’t heard the flood warning, or were stuck at work during the warning and the kids are home, or there was a power outage during the warning and they only have a cordless phone, or they have the flu and can’t get out of bed, or they’re on drugs or just don’t have their shit together, or even that they have heard the warning but don’t take the flood threat seriously.
I don’t care which government entity or branch of the military does evacuations, or why they have to be done, or who has to call whom to get them done, I just don’t want to hear about body bags, roof evacutions, and Sean Penn in a rowboat evacuating people, because the government thought robo-calls and their pleas for personal responsibility were fail safe.
On comment about the lack of “pre-planned” evacuation routes. There aren’t any because no one knows what course the flood waters will take and what roads will be open (or closed!).
Will SR167 be closed? How about SR18? Or even I-5? It depends on which levees hold, collapse, or over-top. No one knows until it rains!
So that’s why people need to at least get a battery-powered radio and whatever you need to shelter-in-place just in case you CAN’T get out!
The evacuation is supposed to be occurring in advance of the flooding, so all roads should still be clear of water. They actually said at the GRCC preparedness meeting that they were working on evacuation routes, they just weren’t done yet, and they’d publicize them when they were done. That was a month ago, which is apalling.
@22, They had detailed aerial maps depicting flood inundation scenarios that show which properties and roads will be out with different flooding scenarios at the GRCC flood preparedness meeting. Unfortunately, they have no plans to put those detailed maps online. There are scattered piecemeal maps with less detail on various websites.
Now the King County Flood Plan website says that people should telephone one of six emergency management offices to ask what their evacuation route is. What percentage of people are going to go to the website, read that, and then go do it? I’m guessing less than 20%. They should just print up the evacuation map on a flyer and mail it to everyone in the inundation zone. Done. Or at least link to online evacuation maps right there.
I would think that once they had the flooding scenario maps the evacuation route project should take one work week max– two days to have stakeholders decide upon the evacuation route in conjunction with traffic flow engineers, one day to have graphic artists draw lines on maps, one day to publicize the routes via the media, and one day to do a mailout of the evacuation routes.
As a side note, the City of Auburn has an online
evacuation map to higher ground in case of lahar that doesn’t utilize SR167 or SR18.
I guess my main beef, is that I think there needs to be someone (an A. Birch Steen) who looks at the preparation that is being done by the various government entities and asks– is this the most efficient, effective, and fail safe way? Making everyone find the number to one of seven emergency management offices, call them, and ask what the evacuation route is, is not efficient. Mailing a map on a flyer to everyone would ensure that more people get the information.
http://your.kingcounty.gov/dnrp/library/…
Even first year engineering students know that it in order to RAISE levees, you also have to WIDEN them, and that would impinge on existing tilt-up office, warehouse and mall buildings and golf courses–land uses that are sacrosanct in the lower Green River valley.
Susie doesn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the Green River levees were never designed to store and convey floodwater in the absence of Howard Hanson Dam in a fully functioning condition. Instead, the y were designed to work in concert with the dam, which got hammered so badly in a flood last January it has holes in it, some of which are as large as Volkswagens. The Corpse is plugging these up do as best it can, but these current repairs are mere bandaids compared to the final solution, a rebuild of the right abutment that it will take up to five years to conduct at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the safety of people who live and work in the valley and all the businesses and infrastructure down will continue to be at risk each winter until the dam gets fixed.
The sad fact is that the river is so squeezed between existing its levees, and so many buildings have been built so close to the tops of these levees that there is no room for “The Marines” or anyone else to massively fortify the levees using conventional engineering methods–tall, deep layers of rock that turn the river banks into a permanent, salmon-hostile lunar landscape–in order to prevent flooding of the lower Green River Valley.
Maybe Susie envisions some other approach, such as rapid construction of New Orleans-style vertical flood walls. Unfortunately, constructing such structures requires deep excavation into and even low the base of the levees and there is no time to do this before the flood season begins next month. Besides, flood walls didn’t work out all that well in New Orleans. In fact, floodwater tipped them over in several places, inducing catastrophic levee breaches that destroyed entire neighorhoods and killed a lot of people.
The prospect of Susie becoming the next King County Executive and being in charge of a highly complex problem like this is deeply scary and is reminiscent of the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland,” whose most famous quotes are “Off with their heads!” and “‘Now, see here, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'” If there could be anyone less effective that “Brownie,” she’s it.
“There are no Marines stationed at Ft. Lewis, dipshit…”
Actually, the Marines Corps Reserves has a post at Ft. Lewis The 4th Landing Support Battalion and 4th Marine Logistics Group are stationed there. Susan Hutchinson’s husband was a Marine stationed there, so she didn’t just this stuff out of her ass like the Stranger does.