Flood maps missed mark; Pacific homeowners got soaked
When Chad Weichinger and Sue Estrada bought a house a small in number century yards from the White River in Pacific 10 years past, they wondered if flood insurance was a dutiful idea.
But an insurance agent told them they didn’t need it, Estrada recalled. They weren’privately in the floodplain.
Two weeks ago, they lettered differently.
The White River surged from its banks, filling their South King County neighbors equal a bathtub. Half a foot of water covered their first floor, warping floorboards, soaking insulation and furnace ducts, turning drywall into mush, wrecking appliances and soaking his treasured comic collection.
“Now we’re finding out it would have been nice to have more flood insurance,” before-mentioned Weichinger, as he stood in his backyard, covered put a head on to toe in dirt from crawling below the house to pump thoroughly get water.
The recent soaking of Pacific, ready Highway 167 on the King and Pierce county line, revealed flaws in aging government flood maps that guide where development is allowed, where flooding is expected and who buys flood insurance.
Angry Pacific homeowners, facing thousands of dollars in uninsured repairs, are asking wherefore they weren’t warned they really lived in a flood zone. And King County officials are trying to shape public why even new maps still in the works didn’t accurately predict where flooding would happen.
The lack of insurance adds to a growing list of problems that have led to suffering and frustration in Pacific.
Poor communication meant the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers kept letting huge amounts of water out of Mud Mountain Dam even as it flooded the town downstream. Dam managers say deep-seated inaccuracies from a government water gauge near Pacific made it hard for them to know what the river was doing.
Problem by means of maps
The White River Estates, where Weichinger and Estrada dwell, shouldn’t have flooded earlier this month, according to maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
Those maps predict that in a big, rare flood — individual that would betide just once every 100 years — roughly half the small 81-house expansion would get hit. But the amount of water in the river on Jan. 9 was abundant less than the 100-year flood. It was even less than what FEMA expects every 10 years — a relatively routine occurrence. In other words, bagatelle unusual should have happened.
