KENT, Wash. — Tuesday was the first day Shelley Pasco could return to her farm, Whistling Train Farm in Kent.
What she found was a foot of water, a line of debris on the wall that showed water was much higher at one point, and a lot of work to do.
“It’s frustrating,” Pasco said, “I want to be able to get in there and start cleaning out my house and picking up trash, but I can’t even get a truck in the driveway.”
Her home is one thing, the feet of water in the greenhouse is another, with the seeds and fertilizers getting soaked, a whole project on its own.
“It’s chicken manure, organic fertilizer,” Pasco describes, “It’s stinky anyway and when it’s wet it’s even worse.
Pasco and her neighbors on 78th street are just south of the Green River in Kent, where water first crept towards their homes on Friday.
Then, in the middle of the night Saturday, the water reached their front doors, sending everyone down the street towards 277th, trying to get to safety.
“It happened really quickly; we couldn’t move the cars in time,” Luis Aguayl Chong said.
Aguayl Chong and his family’s farm hit another test from Tuesday into Wednesday, when a tree fell, piercing the roof of their home in several spots.
“It shook the whole ground because my room is right there,” Aguayl Chong said. “When it hit, all the branches shot away. It’s just rumbling on top of my, it’s crazy.”
Down 78th, David Binfold found his property with eight feet of water in spots closer to the Green River. They moved what they could from the auto shop and junkyard. But some things, like the machine that crushes cars, there was no way to move.
“There’s some really expensive equipment there,” Binfold said, “It’s going to be millions of dollars depending on what lives and what doesn’t live.”
The Green River has been stressed over nine days of flooding, according to King County Department of Natural Resources(KCDNR) leaders.
Levees that contain the flood waters are becoming saturated, and releases from the Howard Hanson Dam are being made to ease pressure from full streams upriver and allow for more space to take water for coming storms.
KCDNR has identified several “areas of concern” on the Green River’s Levees.
John Manca lives between two of them.
“We had a to-go bag,” Manca said, “We’re actually foster parents too so we have a lot of little baby supplies we made sure we had just in case.”
Manca’s home backs up to a bend in the Green River.
He’s seen sandbags under the Veterans Dr. Bridge, near one of the identified problem areas. He’s seen engineers walking the levee path looking for issues. One night, he saw headlights in his backyard at one.
“We had some water right beyond our house that was pooling, but they assured me it’s just from the rains and the runoff and it wasn’t from seepage from underneath the levee itself, even though the water’s right up to the top here for the last week and a half or so,” Manca said.
Manca is reassured by the millions of dollars in projects King County is investing in the levees.
The Green River is expected to stay in minor flood stage through Tuesday as the U.S Army Corps of Engineers continues releases upriver.
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