TUKWILA, Wash. (AP) — Crews used sandbags to short up an earthen levee south of Seattle on Monday after a small section 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.
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.
