Flood May Carry Aid For Old Dike -- Snohomish River Levee May Qualify For `Emergency' Money, At Long Last

John Misich was 6 when he took his first boat ride - a precarious trip at night in a rowboat with his parents and three sisters as they escaped to higher ground during the great Snohomish River flood of 1951.

Since then he's survived more floods than he can count, most in the years before the first dikes along Lowell-Snohomish River Road were built.

So when the river again unleashed its ravenous appetite 4 1/2 weeks ago, gorging itself on the dike, road and fields beyond to gouge a new bay, Misich wasn't surprised.

"Total destruction," he said recently, while walking the length of a temporary, $560,000 dike built by Army Corps of Engineers crews during the height of the flood.

The crews worked around the clock for 10 days to complete the emergency dike, which forms a 1,450-foot arc around the spot where a 1,000-foot span of Lowell-Snohomish River Road used to be. Residents were lucky; the breach is midway between two homes, with just 400 feet to spare on each side.

After 25 years of talk about building a new dike along that stretch of river, on the south shore between Everett and Snohomish, the floods have finally forced the issue. Now that it's an "emergency," federal relief money might solve an old problem for the Marshland Flood Control District.

This time, the flood's impact was felt throughout the Seattle area. AT&T lost two major fiber-optic routes that ran underground along Lowell-Snohomish River Road, cutting off long-distance and operator-assistance services for "a large percentage" of its Seattle-area customers for 13 hours. Sprint Corp. lost a major fiber-optic route for 19 hours.

Until the flood, federal and local officials were working on a $3 million plan to replace the last 2.2 miles of the Marshland district's weakened old dike, composed mostly of dirt and rock.

A new dike was to be built on the adjacent roadbed, and the road relocated atop the dike. County and federal funds had been promised but not yet budgeted.

The existing barrier, called a "peanut dike," is a simple vertical berm dropping from the road's edge to the river. Modern dikes are more like grassy hills, gently sloped on both sides so floodwaters can flow over without causing damage.

Now the long-planned improvement project has turned into a $5 million emergency.

President Clinton is expected to declare flood-stricken Puget Sound counties federal-disaster areas, said Jack Bilsborough, Snohomish County's deputy director of public works.

Federal funds possible

If so, then the Marshland dike project might qualify for the Federal Emergency Management Administration's flood-hazard-reduction program, which aims to eliminate future flood costs. That could help finance a $10.3 million proposal to move the dike and road about 300 feet back from the river, buy 100 acres of farmland and move seven houses.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Jack Metcalf, R-Langley, is pressing the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service for $5 million for the new dike. That agency, formerly the Soil Conservation Service, has $100 million earmarked for small watershed projects in 1997.

Metcalf's intervention apparently was successful, said Matt Brady, Snohomish County's district conservationist for the national agency.

The project has been a long time coming.

U.S. Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an Everett Democrat who died in 1983, helped get Marshland's levee and pump system authorized by Congress in 1959. The Soil Conservation Service began building the Marshland dikes in 1960, and to this day has formal authorization to complete the system.

The reasons for the 25-year delay are many.

Because Lowell-Snohomish River Road already runs on top of the existing levee along that stretch, any dike improvements also would require county funding for a new road. That also would encroach upon riverfront homes, and residents have refused to move or give up more land through easements.

Four landowners are involved, plus families who have rented riverfront homes for decades.

Longstanding feud

In the 1980s, the biggest obstacle was a long-burning feud between Marshland and neighboring diking districts over the height of Marshland's dikes.

Over the decades, Marshland had raised the dikes built by the Soil Conservation Service by more than three feet. That kept its own lands dry by pushing more water over other districts' lower dikes, water that would normally spill over on both sides.

That controversy helped nix Marshland's 1986 attempt to win county permits needed to finish its 9-mile dike system.

Misich, a Marshland commissioner, says this year's flood proves the case he tried to make during that 1986 public hearing, when he showed the county hearing examiner a photo of the spot that eventually broke away in this year's flood.

"The bank was all eroded; there was no vegetation," Misich said. "It was straight up and down, almost to the edge of the blacktop."

Too bad, the hearing examiner said, after listening to complaints from other diking districts as well as county and state agencies. The flood plain will invariably flood, and dikes are not supposed to hold all that water back forever.

Until Marshland played by the rules and lowered its dikes, it wasn't going to get the final link in its system.

The big 1990 flood was the turning point, when one of Marshland's tallest dikes blew out south of Snohomish, inundating Highway 9, the Harvey Field airport and much of the river valley.

In exchange for federal emergency funds to fix its dike, Marshland had to lower its entire levee system by one to two feet and sign an agreement with the region's other diking districts in 1991.

Former Republican state Sen. Cliff Bailey, previously a Marshland commissioner, blames that capitulation for today's problem. If Marshland's remaining stretch of "peanut dike" hadn't been lowered, it wouldn't have been weakened and broken by waters rushing over it, he said.

But on the other hand, that 1991 accord freed up negotiations between Marshland and the county. In 1993, the county moved about one mile of Lowell-Snohomish River Road inland, so a new section of dike could be built on the old roadbed.

The last section was scheduled for construction in 1997 if problems with landowners could be resolved.

Despite the new sense of emergency, and warnings that other sections of riverbank could collapse in the next flood, some people still refuse to move.

"They've been here forever, and they really don't want to see their farms taken apart," said Cheri Misich, John's wife. "It's hard for them. But I don't think I'd want to stick around and see if I fall in the (river)."