DEMING, Wash. — When flood waters across Washington state began rising last December, Mike Khzak’s home became the unfortunate face of the devastation.
His video circulated worldwide, showing his two-story home floating down the Nooksack River. Kazak’s home was the victim of years of flooding that slowly ate away at the property, and this past winter’s storms delivered the final blow.
“The first night I was on those rocks, just like watching them, and I was like, ‘oh man, it’s going to be close,’” Khazak said.
It was despite years of efforts to try and prevent what he now sees as almost a certain fate. He had spent tens of thousands of dollars on rock to fortify against floodwaters.
What was a one-time down payment, Khazak says he should have looked at the bank like a savings account, and kept depositing boulders into the riverbank.
“You always feel like one little rock just in the perfect spot was going to be the one to get you that extra year,” Khazak said, “I don’t feel that way anymore. It was going to do what it was going to do.”
A makeshift buoy system strapped between trees gave Khazak an idea of the increasing speed of the water over the first two-day storm of a multi-week cascade of atmospheric rivers that hammered the Puget Sound region.
That, and constantly checking the NOAA flood prediction website, proved to be his lone warning system.
“It was supposed to crest at 10 p.m. And I was out there at like 9:45, I was out there 10:50 and I was like, ‘yes, another year!’” Khazak said. “I looked at the river forecast, and they changed it from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.”
“I’ve never heard anyone who lives up here say anything about any kind of evacuation stuff,” he continued.
Khazak was unaware that an evacuation text system had been set up for the area years before.
As the Cascadia Daily News reported, some residents didn’t receive the alerts they expected. The paper reported that after the 2021 flooding, residents worked with the former Whatcom County Deputy Director of Emergency Services to create a cell phone-based evacuation alert.
Current Whatcom County Deputy Director of Emergency Services Matt Klein says he was never told about that system.
“I didn’t know that my predecessor had made some promises to the community in Deming about this platform,” Klein said.
There are three main ways in which Whatcom County handles evacuations: door-to-door evacuation notices in the most dire situations where first responder safety can be balanced, emergency alerts that use an EAS tone on cell phones in other immediate threats to life and safety, and platforms that send texts, emails, or calls.
Where Klein says most of Whatcom County uses AlertSense for the latter alerts, Klein’s predecessor set up Genasys for people living near Deming, though it never made it out of the pilot phase.
“We issued a message, but on the AlertSense platform to date, right now, we only have 26 households signed up on that system,” Klein said, pointing out that fewer people were signed up for Genasys.
According to records obtained by KIRO 7 News, there was just one town hall meeting telling the community about the platform after the 2021 floods.
Klein feels that the county could have been more robust in getting the information out.
The county says they send fliers to homes in floodplains each year, notifying them of the upcoming wet season, what to be aware of, and systems like AlertSense they can sign up for.
“We do need to do more work in that area,” Klein said, “How do we better integrate with the community and meet them where they are because how we’ve been communicating up until now clearly hasn’t been effective.”
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