Heavy rain caused flooding in Marysville on Tuesday
Published 1:30 am Friday, November 18, 2016
MARYSVILLE — A powerful rainstorm that moved into the area early this week seems to have had a disproportionate effect on Marysville.
The National Weather Service gauge near Marysville Pilchuck High School recorded 1.24 inches of rain between 2 and 11 p.m. Tuesday. The gauge near 128th Street NE and 43rd Avenue NE recorded even more: 2.04 inches in the same period.
That’s a decent amount of rain, meteorologist Josh Smith said. He said that it usually takes more than that for localized flooding to occur.
Marysville wasn’t so fortunate. The city received 31 emergency calls in the early evening hours, spokeswoman Connie Mennie said, and nine public works employees worked after hours pumping water with vacuum trucks.
Most of the calls were in the Sunnyside and central Marysville areas, she said, with street flooding and clogged storm drains the most common problems.
Two people living off 67th Avenue NE got the worst of it when a drainage ditch on an adjacent property overflowed and flooded their home.
Sean McClelland came home from work around 5 p.m. and was watching TV when the first signs started.
“I walked into the other room and the floor was a little wet, and I didn’t think much of it because we’ve got dogs, maybe one knocked something over,” he said.
An hour later he went back to the room and found the carpet saturated.
Out back, he saw water pouring over a retaining wall on the edge of his property.
His wife, Kerri McClelland, didn’t get home from work until 9 p.m.
“I expected to come home last night expecting to just chill and watch a movie, and my husband’s like, ‘Pick up sandbags!’ ” she said.
“It was like Niagara Falls,” she said.
The ditch lies in a public easement on neighboring private property. It has two outlets, one of which was found to have been blocked, Mennie said. That meant the ditch didn’t drain as quickly as it was supposed to.
The ditch and drains were last inspected in October 2015 and December 2014, Mennie said. They are scheduled to be inspected annually.
The water flooded the McClellands’ house, yard and down their driveway into the cul-de-sac of 66th Drive Northeast. Some water flowed across a neighbor’s lawn, but didn’t appear to damage the house.
They used shop vacuums to get the water out of the house, and Kerri’s father came over to dig a small trench to try and guide the water down the driveway to the street, rather than through their back door.
“We worked until about 5 a.m. continually sucking the water up,” Sean McClelland said.
The McClellands do not have flood insurance, and said the home inspector they hired when they bought the property two years ago told them they wouldn’t need it.
Now they don’t know how they’ll repair the damage to their home, which they are afraid will cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Marysville is mostly low-lying, and experienced serious flooding in June 2010 that damaged several buildings. Water rose almost two feet in some areas.
Most other areas didn’t get the same amount of rain. NWS gauges in downtown Everett, at Paine Field and in Lynnwood only recorded about half an inch of rain each between 2 and 11 p.m. Tuesday.
Everett didn’t receive any emergency calls Tuesday, said Kathleen Baxter, a spokeswoman for the city’s public works department.
Five of the city’s combined sewer outfalls overflowed, however, she said.
That happens in the combined sewer and stormwater system in north Everett when the amount of water in the system is more than the city’s water treatment plant can handle.
The result is that untreated sewage gets discharged directly into Port Gardner or the Snohomish River, or in this case, both.
Everett has been working on a multi-year project to separate sewer and stormwater pipes in an effort to better manage flooding.
Two storm drains in the city were found blocked during Tuesday’s storm, Baxter said.
“And we unclogged them,” she said.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
