Feds won't help Nile Valley homeowners, Gregoire says

NACHES, Wash. — As road crews race to build a detour around the Nile Valley landslide before the weather turns, Gov. Chris Gregoire warned there won’t be any federal disaster aid for those who lost their homes — or may yet lose their homes.

“We need some help here,” she said during a tour of the area Saturday morning. “Right now I don’t see where it’s coming from.”

Six days after the massive landslide buried a quarter-mile of State Route 410 and pushed the Naches River out across the home-strewn flood plain, Gregoire and a host of state and local officials from Yakima toured the site by helicopter and then by car.

Only the morning flyover was part of the original plan. But after seeing the slide from the air, Gregoire decided she needed to take a closer look at both the damage and the repair effort.

“And you’re sure this wasn’t an earthquake?” she asked at one point, remarking on the way the highway had buckled and cracked. Behind her, just outside the slide zone, lies the Woodshed Restaurant, a local landmark that marks the gateway to the Nile Valley, about 13 miles west of Naches.

Throughout the tour, local officials stressed that some 600 homes, resorts and other businesses in the Nile Valley and Cliffdell remain at risk of being cut off from the outside world due to a looming one-two punch from flooding and snowy winter weather.

Despite flooding already caused by the landslide, road crews so far have been able to keep the valley connected to the east by raising the bed of the Nile Road, which runs parallel to the Naches River and provides a bypass around the damaged portion of SR 410.

But officials warn the temporary fix won’t survive seasonal flooding that sometimes starts as early as the end of the month. The answer is to build a new section of Nile Road that will detour around the flood plain farther to the south.

In addition, the foundation of the Nile Road bridge must be buttressed. The bridge spans the Naches River and could be the weak link in all the repair plans.

“We have 30 days,” Yakima County Public Services Director Vern Redifer warned Gregoire. “It could be less.”

“We have to build this road as fast as humanly possible,” added Don Whitehouse, the regional administrator for the state Department of Transportation.

The pressure to keep the road open to the east stems from the fact that the Nile Valley is cut off every winter in the other direction — usually sometime around Thanksgiving — when SR 410 at Chinook Pass to the west is gated off due to deep snow and avalanche hazards.

The closing of Chinook Pass is a seasonal fact of life. Whitehouse said he will try to keep the highway open as long as possible, but he was adamant the pass will have to be closed at some point for the safety of travelers and road crews.

The slide destroyed several homes along SR 410 and flooding has since claimed several homes along the river. Redifer said he’s used $250,000 from a $1 million emergency flood-control fund maintained by the county to purchase three properties in the flood plain that were interfering with repair efforts.

The fund is part of a countywide flood control district that was set up in response to historic flooding in 1996. The county collects 10 cents on every $1,000 of assessed property. That works out to $10 a year for a $100,000 house.

Gregoire, meanwhile, said the federal government will reimburse the state for much of the work necessary to rebuild the roads and other infrastructure of the Nile.

Nevertheless, she stressed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency refused to help when flooding two years ago drowned dozens of homes in Western Washington. FEMA has a 100-house threshold, she said.

“Mother Nature has dealt us a deck of cards, and we’re trying to sort our way through,” she said.

Timothy Lowenburg, the National Guard adjutant and an expert on disaster aid, said FEMA won’t get involved until damage hits a threshold of $7.6 million.

“We’re not even approaching those thresholds here,” he said, adding local residents have “no reasonable expectation” that President Barack Obama will issue a federal disaster declaration.

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