It takes longer to dry out than it does to get wet.
It’s a truism that residents across Edmonds are experiencing after an early December rainstorm drenched the city, flooding homes and causing roughly $1 million in damage to city roads.
“We are putting the pieces back together now,” said public works director Noel Miller. “We are settling into the recovery phase. We can plan things now as opposed to trying to triage things.”
Recovery on Olympic View Drive and 76th Place West will likely continue for weeks, after floodwaters washed out both roads near the Perrinville neighborhood. Construction began this week, but reopening dates for the damaged areas hadn’t been set at press time.
Residential damage has been harder to assess.
Over $2.5 million in residential flood damage had been reported in Snohomish County by press time, but that figure was expected to rise, said John Pennington, director of Snohomish County Emergency Management.
Most residential damage was focused in the Bothell-Lynnwood-Edmonds-Mukilteo area, he said.
All told, the flood caused at least $15 million in damages, and that number is expected to rise, Pennington said. In addition to $5 million in damage to Seattle Hill Road, there was $4 million damage to other roads and public buildings, and $3.17 million to businesses.
Authorities from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were meeting county officials Tuesday, as the county attempted to win federal emergency designations which would open up federal relief funding.
It might be difficult to get federal funding for homeowners, but the county is trying a novel approach as it makes its case to federal decision makers, said Pennington, who used to be a regional manager for FEMA.
“Because there was no real concentration of damage or trauma, a lot of the people who were flooded in this event have never seen (anything) like this,” he said.
That might be true county wide, but it is also true in Edmonds, public works director Miller said.
While residents near Lake Ballinger experienced relatively widespread flooding, the rest of the flooding was sporadic, he said.
“Except for Lake Ballinger, there wasn’t any location where a number of houses flooded,” Miller said. “It was sporadic. It depended on where the surface water went, and whether there were some drainage issues with roof drains, and that sort of thing.”
Except for the two road repairs, all of the city’s other damaged areas have been cleaned up, officials said.
Landslides on three city streets were cleaned the week of the storm, and the waterfront area which was swamped under inches of water during the storm didn’t sustain any serious infrastructure damage, officials said.
Still, the $1 million repair bill means things did get serious.
Fortunately, the city believes it can recover much of the money through federal transportation grants, Mayor Gary Haakenson said Tuesday.
“It was a big job,” he said. “But now we are back to worrying about ice on the streets.”
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