By Bill Lider / For The Herald
One of the most important duties of city government is to protect the health and safety of its residents. Besides the obvious police and fire protection, it is a city’s public works department’s duty to assure the safety of its residents, too.
While potholes in public roads can be ignored or put off, or roads even closed pending repairs, the rail traffic on the Edmonds waterfront cannot. Everyday tens of thousands of gallons of hazardous, toxic and explosive materials move along the Edmonds waterfront.
Unfortunately, the City of Edmonds owns a culvert beneath the Burlington Northern Sante Fe railline for Perrinville Creek that is both structurally and hydraulically deficient. The Herald did an excellent job discussing this issue in its Sept. 21, article, “‘Give them a chance’: The fight to bring salmon back to Edmonds stream.”
Stormwater culverts under the railroad tracks are normally owned and maintained by BNSF, with the one exception being the city-owned, Perrinville Creek 42-inch pipe that since a December 2022 storm has conveyed all flow for the creek. The city’s pipe was installed under the tracks by sometime around 1995. Nobody knows for sure exactly when the pipe was installed, because the city kept no records of its environmental decision, design, or construction.
So why did the city take on the liability for this expensive, continuing maintenance?
In 1984, the city approved a short plat for a home at the mouth of Perrinville Creek, in a mapped floodplain. As a part of the short plat, the homeowner was required to construct a berm to prevent flooding. Instead, the homeowner redirected Perrinville Creek through his yard so he and another downstream neighbor could have a water feature in their landscaped backyards with salmon swimming upstream, even though city code makes it the responsibility of the property owners to maintain stormwater conveyances on private property.
When the downstream property flooded repeatedly because the berm was never constructed, the homeowners somehow talked the city into constructing a flow splitting diversion in Perrinville Creek, just upstream of their properties to prevent flooding. Not only was this structure paid for by the taxpayers, but it also blocked the sediment transport to Puget Sound that helps to nourish the tidelands as well as replenish the beach and now prevents all returning salmon from spawning upstream.
It is now proposed to transport and place this sediment in the Brackett’s Landing Marine Sanctuary, about 2.75 miles south of Perrinville Creek as mitigation; but no environmental work has begun to identify how the sediment will be placed in the marine sanctuary without significant environmental harm. Yet the city is piecemealing the environmental analysis to avoid having to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement to continue maintenance removal of sediment.
Every year, the city spends tens of thousands of dollars removing sediment that would otherwise be naturally deposited in Puget Sound, at no cost to the taxpayers, if not for the city’s flow splitter. No one knows exactly how much the city spends on the creek’s flow splitter, because the city does not track its maintenance cost, which is a gift of public funds for two property owners.
As far back as the 1990s, the city’s own consultants had warned that the culvert was undersized to handle even a 10-year storm. With development in the Perrinville Creek basin over the last 30 years, this pipe today cannot safely convey a five-year storm. Yet in 2012 the city added an additional 125 acres of urban flow into the flow splitter, that maxed out the pipe’s maximum stormwater capacity. This leaves almost no capacity for any Perrinville Creek flow, let alone a 100-year storm.
A February 2022 Lider Engineering report documented that holes have rusted through the pipe’s exposed outfall. At my urging, the city finally hired a consultant to video inspect the pipe in July 2023. This video documented that a hole had opened up in the pipe under the tracks large enough for foundation rock under the tracks to enter the pipe. Both the city and its video consultant failed to identify this hole. This was either incompetence, or worse, an effort to cover up this finding of a structurally deficient pipe to avoid a bust in the Public Works budget.
When this foundational rock drops into the pipe, it will create a void under the rails. For a while, the rock above the void will continue to redistribute the rail load, and the loss of rock will not be visible at the surface. But as the void grows larger, the load and vibration of a train passing over the void will cause a sudden settlement resulting in a derailment.
Any train derailment at Perrinville Creek will result in a major catastrophic accident that could easily match the East Palestine, Ohio, explosion threatening large swath of Edmonds. Should an Amtrak train go into Puget Sound water at high tide, in the dark, during a storm, the loss of life will be horrendous. The cost of damages for dozens of wrongful death lawsuits because the city knew, but failed to act to maintain its culvert, will make its replacement cost look like a bargain.
The city’s flow splitter now serves no beneficial purpose. It totally blocks all salmon passage, it blocks sediment delivery to the beach, it must be constantly maintained after even minor six-month storm events, it provides no flood protection as the city’s pipe is grossly undersized. Yet the city still plans to keep this flow splitter, just so that two downstream property owners can continue to have a water feature in their backyards at taxpayer expense.
The city is currently fighting an appeal of its state environmental Determination of Nonsignificance to continue using its fish-killing flow splitter. The appeal, pending a Dec. 4, hearing, would require preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement so that these issues can be fully disclosed to the public and elected officials.
If the city then determines to accept this risk of an avoidable accident, it will be on the city and its insurance carrier’s responsibility. I urge every citizen in Edmonds to contact the Mayor’s Office and City Council, tell them to stop wasting the taxpayer’s money, and demand that the city withdraw its determination and prepare an impact statement to remove this fish-killing structure.
William Lider, a professional engineer, lives in Lynnwood.
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