Ocean Shores declares a state of emergency

Welcome back into Seattle News today. Matthew Smith hanging out with you guys today. You've got a look from just one day ago out at what Ocean Shores is dealing with. Coastal storms last week, they triggered a citywide emergency in Ocean Shores, elevated water, and now you're seeing all the work being done to make sure things are safe in the area. Whenever I see something like this, it's a good reminder that Mother Nature, she is quite powerful, but also we have a lot of people here locally that have a lot of work to do and do good work to try to make sure things are working properly. Case in point, I want to bring in Scott Anderson and Marshall Reed. We've got both the city administrator and the shoreline administrator joining us live via Zoom. Appreciate you gentlemen for jumping in with me today. Absolutely. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having us on. It's an important topic for Ocean Shores, and I'm glad we're getting coverage for it. Well, and I wanted to just kind of start off with like the mile-high view. So, Scott, maybe I'll ask you, you know, what are you putting out there to the world? What do you want people to know immediately here? Well, this is an issue that we've been dealing with now for several years, and like a lot of erosion issues, it continues to get worse. And we were kind of working with our regulatory agencies and the state agencies on a number of approaches, and they wanted us to kind of use nature-based approaches. And as I say, that kind of works in huge sound and in other areas, but when you're facing the Pacific Ocean straight on, it really hasn't worked. We finally have been allowed to do some hard armoring, which can stabilize our shoreline. And so that's what we've been doing the last week or so. We passed a state of emergency, it seemed like it was a month ago, but it was only three nights ago at city council, and we've been kind of working nonstop in an effort to stabilize that shoreline. And there's both a short-term measure to it and a long-term measure. And from a 30,000-foot view, the long-term measure is we would need to build the remnant jetty back up. But the short-term measure is exactly what you're seeing right now on TV. It's about stabilizing that shoreline, so that saltwater does not break into our freshwater ways because we're across the street there. And so we've got a million-gallon water tank there, vital public infrastructure. And then, of course, we have these homes along the shoreline. We're doing what we can to preserve them. Now, Marshall, I know that there's been a lot of stuff going on out there. We were talking about this in the newsroom yesterday because we saw those, I want to say incredible footage, but when you realize what at stake, I don't like to use the word incredible because it's a scary situation. But I know you guys are dealing with stuff on top of that today. There's just a lot of moving parts here. What are you and your crews up to right now? Well, we're trying to apply a two-tier approach to stabilizing the shoreline in preparation for some storm and tide conditions that are equal to or will exceed what would be a normal king tide. Anybody that's watching the predicted water levels over the last couple of weeks should notice that we're running anywhere from a foot to two and a half feet today above the predicted tide levels. So if you add that to the storm surge or whatever, we're seeing conditions out there that are equal to a king tide event. And on the 23rd, we will experience our first king tide event. And if we still have a two-foot surge. Or Kelvin wave impact, whichever it's determined, then we're going to have a fairly significant event coming up. So we're trying to get ahead of that. We're putting some really large stone on the beachfront. We've got some remainder cobble in the toe of the berm. And then we're building another equally heavy second tier up to break that energy as it approaches the shoreline. The first tier will break the wave up. The second tier should break up any of the additional energy that's stored and then we're still going to experience some overtopping. We don't have any illusions that we've actually got this thing built to the point to prevent overtopping. It's going to happen. We've got contractors and resources lined up to try to prevent and plug any holes that occur should they occur. At this point, I think we are as well prepared as we can be, and you were right in your opening statement there. Mother Nature is in full control out here. Well, yeah, I mean, we talk about it often here on FOX 13 from various stories over the years. You know, it is a constant battle sometimes, Mother Nature versus man, as far as anything from dams to floods, et cetera. But what you guys are dealing with unfolding in real time, I understand that this is something your residents are keenly aware of. You know, this is something historically that has been happening. Thank It seems obviously more drastic right now, so how would you describe to those who maybe don't know ocean shores well, or maybe those that live there and just don't pay attention to this kind of thing, like how we go from this is trending in a bad direction and now it's an emergency, because it does feel like we kind of shifted you. the conversation a little bit from this is a problem Problem two, this is an emergency, right? Yeah, so this emergency, if you've been following the events from Southern California and the Super El Nino that's taking place right now, it produces a Kelvin wave with these higher water levels. Those things are starting to show up on the Washington coastline. So I've been following the events as they move up the western coast of the United States. And so we were not surprised when the elevated energy started hitting our shoreline and the higher levels of water and stuff like that. Um, we were, we were preparing to try to get ahead of it. It's just, we're a small town. We have finite resources, finite finances. And so, you know, once we get to the point of, you know, we're trying to prioritize, you know, projects within the city. At some point, this shoreline trumped everything else, and we had to make it the priority. That happened through our emergency declaration, and there were other projects that got included in that, and we're prepared to deal with those as those resources become available. Yeah, absolutely, and I can add a little bit to that. I mean, we've always had a very living ecosystem. If you look at original pictures of what ocean shores looked like before the jetty was laid down in 1866, it looks very different than it does now. But it's come on very suddenly, and we've had erosion issues on the south end for years, and we've had accretion issues on the other side, on the Pacific Ocean side. And so in addition to that, we've had just over the last several years, the most popular beach kind of in the city for a long time, our residents loved it, was a place called Damon Point. And Damon Point no longer exists. It's now Damon Island. And so that was all within like the last two years sort of swept out to sea. Things are being pushed into the bay. And this is just another example of that. But yeah, as you watch this storm surge drift up the entire West Coast, we're getting the impact of that now. I do want to ask you guys, you know, because you see this coming, but things start getting worse where obviously these waves are being more and more impactful. And I think you did a good job of explaining, you know, the differences of those man-made changes to the landscape and why it looks so different from way back when to now. So I wonder, what do you all anticipate to happen in, say, the next couple of weeks? weeks or months, not today or tomorrow, because I know you guys are kind of bracing for what happens in the next couple of days, but where do you want to see this thing kind of happen? I'm going to turn this part over to Marshall for a minute, but I will just say there's three things that we need to do. One is just to immediately stabilize the shoreline. The second is we need to address areas that are down by our marina, which we are working on. And then the big issue is, of course, the rebuild of the remnant jetty. And the remnant jetty stretched across that bay. It was built by the Army Corps of Engineers when they originally built the North Jetty. That creates a huge safe barrier for the city and helps mitigate erosion issues spectacularly if we could get that rebuilt. You can't see it there in that picture because it's underwater at the moment, but it goes right across that Bay Area. And I'll kind of turn it over to Marshall now to talk about our immediate plans. Yeah, talking about the remnant jetty, over the years, as the jetty has settled into the Bay, It's allowing more of that energy from the open ocean to access the shorelines that we're working on today. There's also a lack of sediment. It used to be there were several places where sediment could get into Oyhat Bay and replenish the stuff that we lose during the winter. And what we lost wasn't as extreme as what we're losing now due to the overtopping of the remnant jetty and then that energy hitting our shoreline. We've lost probably in the last three weeks in an unprotected area of our shoreline that doesn't have any riprap or whatever in excess of, you know, 50, somewhere between 50 and 100 feet. That's unprotected shoreline up in the game preserve. So we'll have to address that in the coming future. There is we we are budgeted and slated to treat 400 feet of the existing shoreline in that neighborhood. And my coastal engineer is walking that right now, and it appears that we're going to have another 300 to 400 feet that's going to require treatment before the king tide. So we'll be tapping our other resources and trying to get into that and prepare, get ahead of that king tide that shows up on the 23rd. uh scott uh marshall i truly appreciate you guys taking a little bit of time to be with me today i know we've got to jump into another story but i know also with all the weather you guys are dealing with you guys are probably battening down the hatches and getting ready so so hope things go well and i truly truly appreciate you guys jumping in and letting not only your local audience but the rest of us know how you guys are doing it down there in Ocean Shores Thank you ever so much for having us. Yeah, it's been a team effort out here. Shout out to all the guys that are working with us. You're doing a great job. Thank you.