Kent Valley flood worries commemorated on custom t-shirts

For businesses and residents living the Green River Valley, watching the odds of a flood this fall go from 1 in 3 to 1 in 32 has been something of a yo-yo and even if the waters don’t come, Danny Kakuk of Little David’s Sub Shop in Kent said this has already been “history.”

“We have been living this thing,” he said. “It’s already history.”

But as he worked this fall to protect his shop and watched neighbors and businesses owners doing the same, Kakuk realized everyone was in the same boat – no pun intended – and decided that someone had to commemorate the event.

What he came up with was a series of T-shirts, including one that reads “United We Sand.”

“Every time something like this happens, someone makes shirts,” he said. “I figured it was a local thing and everyone can relate to it.

“We have been living this thing. This was like a sign of the times.”

Kakuk said his T-shirts are not meant to take lightly the threat of a flood, but instead to give those involved a chuckle. Kakuk said he researched shirts from similar disaster events and even rejected several slogans and ideas he thought might be badly interpreted.

“I was careful when we put this together,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to take this wrong.”

The shirts he did create are light-hearted and mostly humorous takes on the potential for flooding. One shirts declares “property of Green River Valley Track Team” with “Track” crossed out in favor of “swim.” A similar shirt replaces “soccer” with “water polo.”

One shows the state Route 167 logo and reads “Keep local commerce alive. It’s a highway, not a waterway.”

Kakuk said he intentionally tried to stay “conservative” on the shirts because of the seriousness of the threat and though he wasn’t trying to make light of the situation, the humor did provide what he calls “therapy.”

“At the point where we made these things I wasn’t sleeping,” Kakuk said, adding that he is optimistic and hopes that in five years, people will look back on the shirts and laugh about what could have been.

Kakuk said he was inspired in part because he watched several of his usual catering clients shift their budgets to from food to flood protection and found himself worrying about what might happen to his business if water had to be released from the Howard Hanson Dam, the flood-control tool on the Green River.

“A lot of our catering budget went away to sandbagging budgets,” he said.

Kakuk said he would lie awake at night and spend much of his time thinking about what a flood could mean and ways to protect his shop.

“It’s a way of life down here now,” he said. “This is really real.”

Along with his sub shop, Kakuk also owns Fireswap.com, which offers T-shirts and other apparel related to fire departments from around the country. It is through his Fireswap business that he started Floodshirts.com.

Kakuk also said 20 percent of the profits from the flood shirts will be donated to the Kent Kiwanis because, he said, he has seen the way the service club makes a difference in the community.

Kakuk said he is less worried now about flooding because of recent reports from the Army Corps of Engineers lowering the threat, but he is still keeping his eye on the river, located less than a quarter-mile from his sandwich shop.

“If it happens it happens, but we’re going to stay out of the way,” he said. “But even if it doesn’t happen, it’s already history.

“It’s consuming,” he said.

To see the full collection of T-shirts or to purchase one, visit www.floodshirts.com. All of the T-shirts are also available at Little David’s Sub Shop:

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