King County's new flood philosophy: Stop fighting nature
It's a sight only a biologist — or a fisherman — might love: a very big, and very ripe, spawned-out king salmon, tucked under a log in a side channel of the Green River.
This fish, this log and this meander wouldn't have been here even a year ago. A levee used to fence the river and the fish out. Then King County did what until recently was unthinkable: It ripped the levee out and gave this bit of land north of Highway 18 in Auburn back to the river.
The project, completed last year, reconnected the Green River with a side channel to provide refuge for salmon and water to recharge the aquifer. The county planted native vegetation on the banks, and hauled in woody debris to slow the current and create hidey holes for fish.
It's just one of many projects planned to eventually return stretches of land totaling more than 33 miles along the county's major rivers back to nature — rather than fighting it.
The difficulty of trying to hold a swollen river to its banks was on frightening display earlier this month in southwestern Washington, where flooding damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses in the Chehalis River watershed, and closed Interstate 5 for four days.
Levees expected to protect roads and buildings were overtopped by the floodwaters.
The work along the Green River is a new approach for King County, which already has allowed more than $7 billion in development in its floodplains, and has suffered eight federal flood-disaster declarations since 1990, most recently in November 2006.
"Rivers don't negotiate with you. So you have got to figure out what the river's behavior is going to be, and accommodate that," said Ron Sims, King County executive. "Nature has the last vote and the longest memory."
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King County's new flood philosophy: Stop fighting nature
