Bulldozers join floodwaters as threat to neighbors' homes

In a tiny white house that's been home to her family for three generations, Melody Walker sits with her kitten and considers hard choices:

Hang on to the house and risk yet another flood — like the one in December that submerged her basement in four feet of filthy water.

Sell the house at a huge loss on the open market.

Or sell it to the city, which wants to bulldoze all 17 homes on her block and turn it into a drainage pond.

"It's the only home I've ever known," says the 59-year-old legal secretary. Moving from Madison Valley "is just not even something I can imagine."

Walker's block on 31st Avenue East is twice bedeviled: It's the lowest part of the Madison Valley basin, and it was designed by the city to be the collection point for the flood-prone neighborhood's sewer system.

The city says that condemning the entire 200 block, buying all 17 homes at their market value before the last flood and creating an open green space would return the area to its roots as a natural drainage basin — and end a decades-long flooding problem.

That option could be $10 million cheaper than the other option on the table: building a new pipe that would divert a third of Madison Valley's runoff to a new underground storage tank in the nearby Arboretum.

Most residents prefer that to bulldozing because it would let them stay in their homes. But it would also tear up their streets.

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) is taking public comment through Friday on those two preferred options and other possibilities, including a storm pipe to Lake Washington.

While most neighbors in the 200 block try to forestall the razing of their houses, dozens of Madison Valley residents are embroiled in negotiations with the city over how much the city owes them for their homes' diminished value as the result of the 2006 flood.

A big issue is the extent of the city's liability for leaving the neighborhood with a faulty drainage system.

Bruce Hori, the city's risk manager, says an appraiser will meet this month with individual households to settle their diminished-value claims. The offers will reflect the difference between the market value of their homes before the December flood and now.

"We are doing our best to settle the claims and to be fair to the claimants and the other SPU ratepayers," he said.

With the rainy season fast approaching, floods are not just a dollars-and-cents issue for Madison Valley residents. They are a terrifying force.

Several blocks from Walker's home, one of the valley's own, Kate Fleming, drowned last December when a river of stormwater slammed into her basement and trapped her in a windowless room.

Small homes

In some parts of Madison Valley, spacious new houses are replacing the working-class cottages that were built after World War II and bought mostly by African-American families.

In and around Walker's 200 block of 31st Avenue East, most homes are still small, with 1,000 square feet or less of living space.

Walker's house has 720 square feet on the main floor and a similar-sized basement. Like her neighbors, she makes the most of every square inch, finishing her basement to create a bedroom and a den.

Her family moved into the house in 1951. Her dad was a construction worker and cab driver, her mom a homemaker. They dealt with minor floods from time to time, but couldn't afford flood insurance.

It was a close community.

When she was small, her dad would open his house to everyone on the block when he had a barbecue. Her aunt lived across the street, and Walker used to help another neighbor grow beans, corn, cucumber and rhubarb.

The neighborhood is even closer now, brought together in part by major floods in 1977, 1996, 2004 — when residents formed the Madison Valley Victims Association — and again in 2006.

Neighbors help take care of each other's kids and pets. They keep keys to one another's houses, in case of an emergency.

On Dec. 14, 2006, when the last catastrophic storm struck Seattle, Walker and her teenage daughter came home to a disaster in progress: Her basement was waist-deep in raw sewage and runoff that ruined everything from her new furniture to the Motown albums she'd hung onto since the '60s and a vintage Japanese wedding kimono her father had given her.

The neighbors were shocked that water had once again backed up into their homes.

Barbara Lynn, head of the Madison Valley Victims Association, said she'd gotten the impression from city utility managers that a temporary fix was in place.

Lynn said she was dismayed to learn later that the fix — a vault to restrict stormwater from entering the combined sewer system — had actually been two weeks away from completion when the rains hit.

"I had been telling people a lie," Lynn said. "We weren't safe. And I felt really, really bad."

Disappearing fixes

The way to prevent homes from being flooded is to make sure the sewer pipes can empty faster than they fill up during heavy rains.

Until the 1970s, most of the city's drainage system relied on a combined sewer system — stormwater and raw sewage flowing through the same pipes. But when it rained hard, sewage often backed up into homes.

Using money from the voter-approved Forward Thrust bond, the city built storm drains separate from sewer lines across the city, including Alki, Ballard and Wedgwood.

A large part of Madison Valley — some 480 acres — got separated storm drains, too.

The plan called for all that water, plus stormwater from the rest of the valley, to be piped to the intersection of 30th Avenue East and East John Street — around the block from Walker's house.

From there, it was to connect to a yet-to-be built tunnel that would funnel it out to Lake Washington.

But the tunnel never got built. It was scrapped, the city said, because of a failed bond issue and growing concern about polluting Lake Washington.

Many valley residents don't buy the city's explanation.

They say the pricey project never took off because the blue-collar and largely African-American neighborhood didn't have the political clout to make it happen.

The vault to keep runoff from entering the combined sewer system is now working. But it can't handle what the tunnel would have, and the neighborhood remains vulnerable to flooding with every heavy rain.

After the 2004 flood, the city bought up more than half of the 100 block of 30th Avenue East and turned it into a drainage pond like the one it now wants to build on Walker's block.

That condemnation involved fewer homes, so fewer owners had to be persuaded to sell. The city now wants to buy two more homes on that block to expand that drainage area, in addition to the 17 homes in Walker's block.

Sounding an alert

With the rainy season approaching again, SPU has put an early warning system in place for the lowest points in the valley.

Residents can give the city two phone numbers, and if rain gauges trigger alarms, a computer will call their homes to warn them to get out of their basements immediately.

To some residents, it's the least the city could do.

Tax rolls show the appraised values of some properties in the 200 block have fallen by more than $50,000 since the 2006 flood, about a 15 percent drop.

Walker and nine other homeowners have hired attorney Richard Maloney to pursue claims against the city for their diminished property values.

Maloney says the city owes them an apology for decades of neglect to their drainage system, as well as compensation for their emotional and financial losses.

The city has made "insultingly low" offers to his clients for their mental anguish, he said, and now its answer to the flooding "is to carve out the heart of this community."

"This has the beauty of eliminating potential claims and putting in the cheapest solution money can buy," he said.

The city can pay a fair settlement now for diminished value, he said, or risk paying far more later if residents take their fight to court and win a big jury verdict.

City officials say they have hired a real-estate appraiser to look at each claim.

Katherine Schubert-Knapp, a city spokeswoman, says the analysis includes looking at flood damage, repair costs, the value of comparable properties and other factors.

It's complicated, she said.

"These claims are the result of a 35-year-old problem that the City must fix," she wrote in an e-mail. "These homes were built in what was originally a natural drainage basin and the City is working on a solution that will take care of these problems once and for all."

Madison Valley residents have become skeptical of such promises.

Some favor an option that utility managers were offering just seven months ago — the stormwater tunnel to Lake Washington.

It's the same idea that was first proposed in the 1970s but shelved. City managers proposed it again after the 1996 flood, but didn't pursue it.

It's back on the table again, but SPU says it's too costly — between $40 million and $80 million, depending on the degree of water treatment required.

Turning Walker's block into a green space and drainage pond would probably take until 2010 because all 17 houses would need to be bought up, said Linda DeBoldt of SPU.

Building a drainage pipe to the Arboretum storage tank could be completed sooner, she said, probably by the end of 2009.

A solution can't come fast enough, said Barbara Lynn of the victims' association. "We're scared — feel like sitting ducks," she said.

"We don't want another death."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com