rivers

After about five years in the works, the Pierce County Council adopted a new Comprehensive Flood Hazard Management Plan that broadens the scope of what kinds of flooding the county will plan for – from coastal to urban flooding. Angela Angove is the floodplain and watershed services manager with Pierce County Planning and Public Works. She said different types of flooding are top of mind for people in the county, recalling the King Tides that caused tidal flooding last December.

In the foothills of Mt. Rainier runs the Carbon, the Puyallup and the White Rivers, meandering through towns and cities, along roadways and near homes, the paint strokes of the natural environment now surrounded by a human-built ecosystem. Once tightly restricted by levees, these rivers are beginning to again flow closer to how they would have, not adhering to the confines and rules of where humans want water to go.

It’s still warm in the afternoon on the edge of the Columbia River as water laps against the shore.A team of Environmental Protection Agency scientists…

Washington Rep. Steve Tharinger of the 24th district became intimately acquainted with levee setbacks when he discovered the levee protecting his house on the lower Dungeness River was not only not protecting his house, but harming the ecosystem too.“I sold my house and the five acres in a barn we had, so that we'd have more room to move that levee back and give the river more room,” Tharinger said.

(Runtime 3:51)Marsha Stipe lives in Richland where, pretty much every day, she goes for a walk on a scenic path along the Columbia River.“Well, they’re…

Almost 40 years ago, Scott Nicolai started his stream restoration career taking logs out of the water. A project that’s putting more than 6,000 logs back into remote streams across Central Washington.

One of Idaho’s struggling salmon species could eventually become self-sustaining in the wild under the federal government’s new recovery strategies.The…