NEWS

REBUILDING LEVEES UNDER WAY

By: Mike Archbold The News Tribune November 20, 2008

Standing in his front yard on the levee next to the Carbon River, Don Heins recalled on Tuesday the sound of last week’s Veterans Day storm ripping at the levee.
“It was about 1:30 or 2 in the morning,” he said as he watched the jaws of a big excavator pull trees from the levee. “I thought it was big boulders going downstream.”

When the sun came up, he saw what had happened.

The river had torn out about 25 feet of levee bank. The large rocks that held the levee were gone, swept away by the rain-swollen river. In their place was a vertical wall of dirt, about 5 feet tall.

If he had known that was happening, he said, he would have gotten out of there in the night. He said he is used to big rocks rolling down the river “shaking the ground.”

“It’s the first time that has happened,” he said of the washout since he moved next to the river south of Orting in 1977.

The excavator at work Tuesday was part of a Pierce County Surface Water Management crew repairing the 300-foot-long cut in the levee. A second levee gash about a quarter-mile downstream also threatened the Foothills Trail.

Work on the Foothills Trail repair is expected to start today, said Mike Dacca, who is overseeing the repairs there for Pierce County. The trail will be closed for perhaps 10 days at milepost 4.3 to do the work.

The repairs are among at least 10 that will be under way in the next few days in the Orting area along the Puyallup and Carbon rivers. More than 30 sites need work, though not all are an emergency, said Tony Fantello, maintenance and operations manager for the county’s Surface Water Management.

For the rest of the story see: www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/542564.html