Crews use sandbags to shore up levee breach near Seattle after failure
prompts flood warning
[December 16, 2025]
By MANUEL VALDES and CLAIRE RUSH
TUKWILA, Wash. (AP) — Crews used sandbags to shore up an earthen levee
south of Seattle on Monday after a small section of it failed following
a week of heavy rains, prompting an evacuation order covering parts of
three suburbs, officials said.
The evacuation order from King County in Washington state was sent to
about 1,100 homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of
Kent, Renton and Tukwila, said Brendan McCluskey, the county's emergency
management director. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood
warning that initially covered nearly 47,000 people, but was reduced
within a few hours to an area covering 7,000 people.
No one was injured, McCluskey said.
Authorities in Renton and Tukwila said Monday afternoon that the
flooding was confined to small, industrial areas and that no residents
were being evacuated.
The levee breach followed days of heavy rain and flooding that inundated
communities, forced the evacuations of tens of thousands of people and
prompted scores of rescues throughout western Washington state.
The failure occurred on the Desimone levee beside the Green River, in an
area where officials had been concerned about a possible breach, John
Taylor, director of the King County Department of Natural Resources and
Parks, said at a news conference Monday.
With high water levels in the past week, workers began installing a
“seepage blanket” — a permeable material that can remove water from a
cut slope — in an effort to reduce the flood risk, and crews were
present Monday when the breach occurred.
“We were there because we are monitoring these levees closely,” Taylor
said. “It’s just not typical to have these levees have this much water
behind them for this long. They’re getting saturated and they’re
starting to show the effects of that.”
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Crews inspect a crack in a levee along the Green River in Tukwila,
Wash., Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Valdes)
The spokesperson for the city of Renton, Laura Pettitt, said the
breach was minimal and was being filled with sandbags, including
large ones about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and holding about a ton of
sand.
“What we understand is that the area is being managed and the breach
has been controlled,” she said. “However, that’s not to say that
there wouldn’t be future impact with any changing situation.”
A section of paved bike path along the top of the levee in Tukwila
cratered and broke where the levee washed away beneath it.
Reid Wolcott, warning coordination meteorologist with the National
Weather Service, said the flash flood warning was initially issued
for a “rather large area because we didn't know specifically which
areas would flood."
“We have since refined the initial alerting area to a much smaller
area, and we will continue to refine that alert as we learn more
information on the potential impacts,” he said.
The levee was badly damaged during flooding in 2020. Long-term
repairs were not expected to be completed until 2031, according to a
blog post from the King County Department of Natural Resources and
Parks.
In August 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began repairs to a
775-foot-long (235-meter) segment of the levee, as the result of
flooding in March 2014, according to the federal agency. The damage
significantly impacted the levee’s ability to protect an area of
about 7.5 square miles (19 square kilometers). The repairs were to
be completed by the end of 2015, though it wasn't immediately clear
when work concluded.
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