City crews and contractors expect to finish placing 20,000 giant sand bags along a 12-mile stretch of Green River levees in Kent by Oct. 30 to help protect the city from flooding this winter.
“We started Oct. 3 and the crews are ahead of schedule,” said Tim LaPorte, city interim public works director, during an update about the project at the Tuesday City Council meeting. “They have been working two, 10-hour shifts. We are on schedule to be completed by Oct. 30.”
City crews had filled more than 11,000 giant sandbags through noon Tuesday. Contractors had placed the bags along more than half of the levees.
The 3-foot-square sandbags weigh nearly 3,500 pounds each. The bags will increase the height of the levees by up to 3 feet and be able to handle river flows as fast as 13,900 cubic feet per second.
“This has been a very ambitious project,” LaPorte said. “The choreography is very difficult to achieve.”
Contractors must back dump trucks down the Green River Trail to place the sandbags. The trail remains closed where crews are working. The trail will remain closed to bicyclists as long as the sandbags are in place, but be open to pedestrians.
The white sandbags are wrapped in black plastic to help prevent the bags from breaking down from exposure to ultraviolet rays.
“The best news in this is that we asked the Council to approve $3 million and the King County Flood Control District and the County Council agreed to reimburse the city for $2.5 million,” LaPorte said. “Those funds will go back into our storm drainage fund for other projects.”
Water leaking through a damaged abutment at the Howard Hanson Dam has yet to be resolved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency in charge of the flood-control dam. The leak increases the risk of flooding this winter in the Green River Valley and the cities of Kent, Auburn, Renton and Tukwila.
Corps officials expect to finish construction of a grout curtain along the abutment by Nov. 1, but the $8.7 million temporary fix still will not allow as much water as normal to be stored in the Eagle Gorge Reservoir behind the dam. Corps officials estimate it will take three to five years to construct a concrete cutoff wall as a permanent fix.
The federal government built the rock-and earth-fill Hanson dam in 1961 to control major flooding in the Green River Valley.
The problems with water storage behind the dam started when a 10-foot-wide depression formed on the embankment next to the dam after heavy rain in early January. The dam is about 25 miles east of Kent.
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