Esco Bell walked the length of Mount Vernon’s 1.7-mile floodwall just after midnight on Friday, watching the water creep up to the brim of the only barrier separating the surging Skagit River from the city’s historic downtown.
The water was “barely, barely a foot” below the edge, said Bell, the city’s former public works director who oversaw the wall’s construction in 2019.
Retired, Bell still had to see for himself whether 15 years of planning and a herculean bureaucratic lift could hold back the record swell. It did. The river crested at 37.7 feet, short of the floodwall and of catastrophic projections.
Not all levees in Skagit County are designed like Mount Vernon’s floodwall. It was built to meet specific standards set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, because the downtown fell within FEMA’s map of the area deemed to be at highest risk of flooding.
Within this boundary, properties are subject to mandatory flood insurance and restrictive building requirements.
Mount Vernon wanted to protect its riverfront and — by building a protective barrier — rid itself of FEMA’s floodplain designation. The wall accomplished both goals.
But elsewhere in Skagit County, residents may not know whether they would be at risk during record flooding. FEMA flood maps in Skagit County haven’t been updated in 40 years. The county is among only 11% nationwide whose maps are that old, according to a 2019 report by the nonprofit First Street, an organization that researches climate risk.
Maps in King and Snohomish counties were updated in 2020, FEMA data shows, and Whatcom County’s maps were updated in 2019.
While Mount Vernon’s floodwall held, other areas experienced damaging flooding. Once the waters recede, officials can determine if homes outside FEMA’s boundaries flooded and whether they were insured. It’s possible that a new map — that reflects the current landscape and flood prevention measures — could have better prepared those residents.
Some in the Skagit Valley have resisted efforts to update flood maps, fearing higher flood insurance costs, development hurdles, decreased property values and the potential loss of farmland.
Skeptics say there’s no risk of working with older flood maps. But others point out that people may have unknowingly bought property in areas prone to severe flooding or didn’t know that they should have flood insurance.
County officials say they have taken steps to strengthen flood resilience, and the region’s levees did withstand much of last week’s downpour.
Lisa Janicki, a Skagit County commissioner of 10 years, supports updating Skagit’s FEMA maps but added, “Even without the new maps, the old maps are still pretty accurate.”
The Skagit is the third-largest river by water volume west of the Rockies, and nearly all of its neighboring communities and farmland were once marshes. It’s no stranger to flooding, but the recent deluge tested the limits of its levees and dikes.
It’s hard to tell whether Skagit County’s levees need upgrades — none of the region’s levees reportedly failed — but images of several feet of floodwaters pouring into homes and businesses last week raise the question of whether the county could prevent future damage if its flood maps weren’t frozen in time.
FEMA uses data and modeling — factoring in historical water levels, the landscape and flood control systems — to predict which areas are at the highest risk of flooding. It categorizes properties as inside or outside the “100-year floodplain,” the area with a 1% annual chance of flooding. If a property is built inside the boundaries and has a federally backed mortgage, it must have flood insurance. FEMA disaster relief is a separate program.
Reasons for pushback
In practice, experts say maps can guide land planning to minimize flood risk — like they did in Mount Vernon, which built its floodwall to FEMA’s standards.
At the same time, flood mapping is complicated, thorny and often political.
Sarah Pralle, an environmental and climate policy expert at Syracuse University, found as much in her 2019 study, “Drawing Lines: FEMA and the politics of mapping flood zones.”
FEMA loops communities and local leaders into its mapping process and takes into consideration a number of factors.
“There are a lot of reasons for pushback,” Pralle said, naming property values, development restrictions and burdens on local government coffers. In some cases, Pralle discovered that opponents went “so far as to reach out to politicians at higher levels of government to get them to put the squeeze on FEMA.”
Besides informing flood control measures, the maps form the backbone of the National Flood Insurance Program, a federally backed plan that underwrites risks that come with unpredictable flooding.
The program’s premiums are based on risks decided by FEMA, and if FEMA’s flood map borders expand, it could come at a cost to homeowners.
“When insurance costs go up, politicians and local officials don’t want to be responsible,” Pralle said.
The maps are also a tool to communicate more realistic flood risks to vulnerable groups, she said. You can plug your address into a FEMA webpage and it will tell you your property’s flood risk. “But,” Pralle said, “if you don’t know where the risky areas are, none of that works.”
The maps are designed to discourage development in areas prone to dangerous flooding, Pralle said.
The Skagit Valley’s river basin was altered by generations of logging and diking, by dams and roads. One look at the vast watershed and it’s no surprise that more than half the county’s 130,000 residents live somewhere within the boundaries of the 100-year floodplain.
When it comes to Skagit County’s flood maps, several groups — farmers, developers, tribes — have varying interests along the river that federal and local officials have to consider, said Ted Perkins, who retired from FEMA this year and worked on Skagit Valley flood research.
“This has been going on for a very long time,” Perkins said of Skagit County’s flood discussions with federal agencies. His work on the topic spanned 16 years with FEMA and nine years as a hydraulic engineer at the Army Corps of Engineers.
Not long after a 1990 flood in Western Washington inundated 8,000 acres of Fir Island with up to 10 feet of standing water, the Army Corps of Engineers, which supports federal floodplain management efforts, launched a study of ways to reduce the Skagit Valley’s flood risk.
Millions of dollars, scores of documents and several years later, the general investigation stalled.
“The Skagit watershed is gigantic. They just kept saying, well, we’re gonna have to take more money and we’re gonna need more time,” said state Sen. Keith Wagoner, R-Sedro-Woolley. “It was a typical over-budget and not-on-schedule project.”
When the Corps’ general investigation stalled, so too did the possibility of flood map revisions, said Janicki, the Skagit County commissioner. Regardless, the county needs to do more to protect itself from flooding, the commissioner said.
A spokesperson for FEMA’s regional office couldn’t comment on the Skagit County flood maps by deadline, saying on Saturday that its focus was on life and safety.
“I think there’s this narrative being peddled that if we update the FEMA maps, it will solve something,” said Will Honea, an attorney for Skagit County who serves as a natural resources adviser. “Not really. I mean, some marginal change might occur.”
Before recent flooding, Honea proposed creating a county climate impact committee of local experts and stakeholders “to sort out these hard scientific questions on the floodplain.”
To Bell, the former Mount Vernon public works director, flood risk is an abstraction. On paper, the data and studies say the entire valley is likely to flood.
No one can predict whether Mount Vernon’s floodwall will be overtopped by a torrent of water one day. But, Bell said Saturday, he can see the Skagit from his home office window. He can see the riverwalk and the adjoining downtown, so close to a potential natural disaster.
“All of a sudden, it’s not abstract at all,” he said. “It’s terrifying.”
Seattle Times reporter Sydney Brownstone contributed to this story.
