Will flooding force Seattle’s South Park residents to leave?

Climate Lab is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project is funded in part by The Bullitt Foundation, CO2 Foundation, Jim and Birte Falconer, Mike and Becky Hughes, Henry M. Jackson Foundation, University of Washington and Walker Family Foundation, and its fiscal sponsor is the Seattle Foundation.

SOUTH PARK — The water came with no warning. Jessica Marden woke up to the sound of her basement door coming off its hinges, the frame shattering.

The rising Duwamish River flowed into her backyard over the river’s banks. River water pooled into the basement stairwell, putting pressure on the door until it burst.

Marden had planned for flooding. The year before, 8 inches of water filled her basement. So she put belongings in plastic tubs. But this time, the water — brown, murky and mixed with leaves — was nearly 2 feet higher and pouring into the bins.

Trying to save what she could, Marden recalls running around in her Crocs — before they floated away.

This flood, on Dec. 27, 2022, highlighted how bad things can get in an urban neighborhood on the front lines of climate change. In a city of bluffs and hills, there is perhaps no other place more vulnerable. South Park is low-lying and filled in with homes, businesses and heavy industry. After decades of industrial pollution, discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, known as redlining, and disinvestment, flooding is only the latest injustice Seattle’s largest riverfront community has had to bear.

Families have already been displaced by the floods. And sea-level rise is projected to increase in the decades to come. For the nearly 1,500 South Park households, with about a quarter of the population below the poverty line, the future of much of the neighborhood is uncertain — even as King County and Seattle Public Utilities plan to spend tens of millions of dollars more to stave off the water.

During the flood of 2022, the Duwamish — fueled by rain, a low-pressure storm system and a king high tide — reached over 13 feet, 4 feet higher than a usual high tide for the neighborhood, overtopping the river’s banks and setting a record high.

It would displace residents in 25 damaged homes, contaminate belongings, damage businesses and forever change the neighborhood’s sense of security. Until then, residents believed it would be decades before that kind of flooding would appear.

King tides could be a foot higher by 2050, and 2 to 3 feet higher or more by the end of the century. Some residents hope to stay in the homes and the vibrant neighborhood they’ve lived in for over a decade while others acknowledge it will only be a matter of time until the river forces them out.

Marden’s yard is her oasis, tucked beside an industrial area. The black locust trees in her backyard shade the home so well she has never felt like she’s needed air conditioning. The river may be a Superfund site, but her home is still waterfront property, she joked. Every spring and summer the cormorants and ospreys flying along the river, and playful otters bring her tremendous joy.

“I love living in South Park, and I love my house,” Marden said. “I also recognize that the best thing for the river might be for me to be gone.”

How a neighborhood floods

Nestled along the Duwamish, South Park is bisected and hemmed in by highways. It’s an isolated but resilient neighborhood, where residents speaking in a diversity of languages say they can count on one another, said Dagmar Cronn, a former president of the South Park neighborhood association who has experienced flooding.

It’s the smallest Seattle neighborhood by population after Georgetown, and has been chronically overlooked, she said. As of 2021, the neighborhood’s median household income was about $62,000, nearly $43,000 lower than that of all Seattle households.

Flooding can manifest in a few ways.

In the northern, largely industrial area of the neighborhood, stormwater mostly flows through a system of pipes or culverts to the river. But if the river is too high, the rainwater is unable to drain. That happened in December when flooding disrupted businesses and alarmed residents.

A second type of flooding has become familiar to residents in a row of homes on South Kenyon Street. Here, both stormwater and sewage from sinks and toilets enter an older combined sewer system. When everything is working correctly, this wastewater flows to the West Point Treatment Plant in Discovery Park, where it is treated and discharged into Puget Sound.

This system can fail when West Point gets overwhelmed by heavy rain. For most of Seattle on this system, this would trigger a “combined sewage overflow” where the extra wastewater is released into a body of water, like Lake Washington or the Sound.

But in South Park, the emergency overflow point for sewage and stormwater is the Duwamish. When the river is too high, the overflow is blocked. The only place for wastewater to go is into the streets, businesses and homes of residents.

These types of sewage backups, specifically due to storms or infrastructure capacity, have happened at least 21 times since 2004 in South Park, though not all were backups into homes and businesses, according to Seattle Public Utilities, which reports the incidents to the state Department of Ecology. One incident in 2017 was so severe it displaced 24 residents and King County paid about $650,000 for cleanup, relocation and damage claims.

Then there are people like Marden, who live in a portion of South Park that technically is unincorporated King County, dubbed the “the sliver on the river.” These homes, which also can experience street flooding similar to the northern part of the neighborhood, are on septic systems and rainwater drains through the ground or through culverts and ditches directly to the river at the end of South Southern Street.

Dan Slemko, who also lives on the river, said that for the past six years, his basement has flooded during high tides and rain. If it weren’t for the commercial pump that runs nearly six months of the year, he said, there would be at least a foot of water in his basement during high tides.

The Duwamish along South Park could see 7 to 13 inches of sea-level rise by 2050, and between 1.7 and 3.2 feet by 2100, according to data from a 2018 report by Ian Miller, a University of Washington coastal hazard specialist who studies sea-level rise. There is a very small chance that the region could see up to 5 feet of sea-level rise by 2100, which could lead to flooding in Georgetown and Boeing Field during high tides and storms.

While the 2022 flood in South Park was a “very extreme event,” Miller believes it would have been “close to impossible” without the sea-level rise that has already been observed in Puget South over the past century.

Before the 2022 flood, more than 2 inches of rain fell at Boeing Field over three days. In a cruel coincidence, just as the peak of the king tide arrived — a window of time that only lasts an hour or so — atmospheric pressure dropped significantly, pushing the neighborhood’s limits.

“It was like a snake eyes event,” Miller said. “The dice rolled perfectly.” 

What the water took

On the morning of Dec. 27, 2022, Kelly McKnight’s daughter complained the downstairs toilet was overflowing again. McKnight went downstairs to take a look at her den, a bathroom and two of her kids’ bedrooms.

“The water was coming up and under the door at a really rapid pace. There was no ‘maybe I can save the couch.’ There was none of that,” she said.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Robin Schwartz, who also works at the Duwamish River Community Coalition, heard the alarms on the grinder pump in her yard, suddenly underwater. Cronn, who lives along the river, could hear the sound of water hissing into her basement from upstairs.

One South Park resident later told TV news cameras that her mother had been unable to open the door due to the pressure of the water and had to climb out the window of her basement apartment to escape.

Stephanie Ung, the former co-executive director of the Khmer Community of Seattle King County, said the organization learned about the flooding when the mother of a family called in a panic as water was coming into her house. 

Until then, a group of at least 14 Khmer residents — including around three children — lived on the block in five homes, said Thyda Ros, the current executive director of the Khmer organization.

Due to their experience as genocide survivors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many Khmer residents are afraid to ask too many questions and don’t know whom to trust, Ros said. 

“To this day, our elders have been experiencing living in survival mode, living with fear and anxiety,” she said. 

Within the hour, workers from Seattle Public Utilities and TV news crews arrived. Later in the week, people from the city took contaminated belongings out of homes and hauled away appliances, furniture and clothing, Schwartz said. Any salvageable personal belongings were put in storage containers provided by the city.

The city booked people into hotel rooms and short-term rentals. One resident, who preferred to remain anonymous, stayed in a hotel until September. SPU spokesperson Rebekah Anderson said “most residents” were back in their homes within six months of the flood. The resident said he lost cherished personal items, like his diploma and pictures from home and his graduation. He was able to save his church shirt, hanging in the closet during the flood, and his wedding band. McKnight said some photos of her three children survived, but they don’t look or smell great.

In the months following the flood, SPU paid to fully renovate around 21 homes on South Kenyon Street that were damaged by water and sewage. With funding from King County, SPU estimated it spent about $1.2 million on relocation and storage costs and to hire damage assessors and contractors to clean up the properties and another $1.2 million in damage claims to landlords and residents.

Over two years since the flood, only around half of the original Khmer residents remain in the same buildings, where they formed a community, Ung and Ros said.

They were immediately thrust into housing instability. It was unclear whether they could return to the units where they paid $600 a month. Three of the families were without permanent housing eight months after the flood until, with help from former Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, they received housing support, Ung said.

“There’s all this talk about not wanting people to have to leave South Park in order to get help but the reality is there (was) just not housing that (was) affordable at that time,” Ung said.

What happens to a place like South Park?

SPU and other agencies had been planning infrastructure projects around sea-level rise in South Park for years, but the 2022 flood “lit a fire under the city (and) the county,” according to Ann Grodnik-Nagle, a climate adaptation policy adviser with SPU. 

In the aftermath of the flood, SPU came up with an emergency response plan for winter king tides and has paid community organizers, like Schwartz, to help educate and solicit feedback from residents.

Each winter, the utility also installs a nearly 4,000-foot-long sandbag wall along the lowest parts of the South Park shoreline. This wall is built to withstand river heights up to the peak of the river during the 2022 flood and higher. In December, it held up against a river height of 12 feet during a king tide and high winds in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

These short-term efforts are estimated to cost $1.1 million to $1.6 million a year and have been funded by the King County Flood Control District in the past, SPU spokesperson Brad Wong said.

SPU and King County have also spent around $2 million to install pumps meant to prevent sewage backups in individual homes on or near South Kenyon Street.

For longer-term solutions, around $74 million between Seattle and King County has been spent on projects meant to address stormwater and sewage issues in the neighborhood since 2013. This includes the two projects that were completed in 2023 — a $33 million pump station that forces stormwater into the river when it is high and a $25 million effort to install drainage and repave roads in one portion of South Park’s industrial neighborhood.

Another two proposed projects totaling $98 million would add a stormwater treatment facility and drainage for the neighborhood. King County has also replaced pipes and adjusted infrastructure and has additional planned projects to improve flooding in the neighborhood.

The “Duwamish Valley Resiliency District,” which includes residents and businesses in South Park and Georgetown, discusses potential solutions in the decades to come. These include building a permanent floodwall, elevating homes, buying out people living in flood-prone areas or restoring habitat and floodplains that would give the river more room to rise and fall.

“The question still stands on funding for these projects, because it cannot come from SPU’s rate base, and this is a city problem, it’s a county problem, it’s a regional problem,” Grodnik-Nagle said.

Meanwhile, the residents of South Park are left in limbo, as the winter rain brings a sense of hypervigilance and anxiety.

During a recent community meeting, Maria Teresa Tellez said through an interpreter that each winter she pays extra attention to where she leaves her purse, important documents and computer. Tellez said that while she’s grateful for more information and the community that has formed in the aftermath of the flood, it has also added to her stress.

“Living like that every year and knowing that things are going to get worse is something that the neighbors have to deal with. It affects their mental health and affects their health in general,” she said through an interpreter.

Schwartz said the more she learns about this issue the more strongly she believes that buyouts might be the only long-term solution, a scenario that saddens her since it’s likely the money she would receive wouldn’t be enough to find her a home in the neighborhood.

“I love South Park. I really don’t want to leave. I put down strong roots but what I really regret is the idea that I’m not going to have anything to leave my kids,” she said.

McKnight echoed the sentiment, adding that she doesn’t want to leave her children “a literal sinking ship.”

“Can we live here or not? When do we get to know the answer?” she said. 

Every day, Marden can see the tide coming in and out from her home, water flowing into the river from the banks and seagulls looking for food on the flats. If she can’t stay, she would like to see the land made wild again and returned to local tribes for management.

Until then, she said she’ll find strength in the South Park community, a group of people who have pulled together for each other for decades.

“Even if SPU, the city, the county, everybody lets me down,” she said. “My neighbors won’t.” 

Seattle Times staff reporter Manuel Villa contributed reporting.