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Flooding the Election Zone
As King County struggles to deal with an unprecedented budget crisis (closing animal shelters, cutting back most human services), one office will actually get additional money: King County Elections, which just moved its offices from Renton to Tukwila due to concerns about flooding from the Howard Hanson Dam, which protects the Green River Valley, where the elections office is located.
King County just moved its elections office from downtown Seattle less than two years ago, at the end of 2007. That move, into a renovated two-story building big enough to house all the functions of the elections office, cost the county around $350,000. Although King County Elections spokeswoman Kim van Ekstrom said "we don't have a good handle on what the total cost is" for the latest move, the county has estimated it at around a million dollars.
Why did the county move into a new building in a flood plain in the first place? That's a little hard to discern. Van Ekstrom says that initial studies by the county and the Army Corps of Engineers found that the building was right outside the flood zone; "when they looked at it further"—that is, after the elections office had already moved to Renton—"they found out that we were right in the flood zone," van Ekstrom says. "We found that we would have the potential for flooding right around the general election," on November 3.
Casondra Brewster, spokeswoman for the Seattle office of the Army Corps of Engineers, says the official "flood zone" hasn't changed, as far as she knows, but that the dam "isn't operating at full capacity" right now due to leaks on the right side of the dam, a 450-foot-wide pile of rock deposited by a landslide 10,000 years ago.
In the long term, Brewster says, the Corps plans to build a huge wall of concrete underneath the dam. That should be done within three to five years.
In the meantime, though, the county has no plans to move back even once the dam is shored up. "Whether or not we're going back to that place any time soon really depends on whether it becomes safe" from flooding, van Ekstrom says.
King County just moved its elections office from downtown Seattle less than two years ago, at the end of 2007. That move, into a renovated two-story building big enough to house all the functions of the elections office, cost the county around $350,000. Although King County Elections spokeswoman Kim van Ekstrom said "we don't have a good handle on what the total cost is" for the latest move, the county has estimated it at around a million dollars.
Why did the county move into a new building in a flood plain in the first place? That's a little hard to discern. Van Ekstrom says that initial studies by the county and the Army Corps of Engineers found that the building was right outside the flood zone; "when they looked at it further"—that is, after the elections office had already moved to Renton—"they found out that we were right in the flood zone," van Ekstrom says. "We found that we would have the potential for flooding right around the general election," on November 3.
Casondra Brewster, spokeswoman for the Seattle office of the Army Corps of Engineers, says the official "flood zone" hasn't changed, as far as she knows, but that the dam "isn't operating at full capacity" right now due to leaks on the right side of the dam, a 450-foot-wide pile of rock deposited by a landslide 10,000 years ago.
In the long term, Brewster says, the Corps plans to build a huge wall of concrete underneath the dam. That should be done within three to five years.
In the meantime, though, the county has no plans to move back even once the dam is shored up. "Whether or not we're going back to that place any time soon really depends on whether it becomes safe" from flooding, van Ekstrom says.
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