Dozens of people filed a lawsuit against King County and its flood control district Monday morning, arguing that the entities knowingly allowed aging levees and flood barriers to languish without crucial repairs.

After a series of atmospheric rivers dumped record rainfall on Western Washington in December, a pair of deteriorating flood barriers broke open, pouring water from the Green and White rivers into Tukwila and Pacific, sparking mass evacuations and causing untold millions in damage.

These failures were more than an unfortunate coincidence, argues the lawsuit, which was filed in King County Superior Court. The complaint seeks damages for dozens of people and several businesses hurt by the floods.

“This wasn’t just a storm — it was a failure of infrastructure the county knew was at risk,” said Ryan Saba, an attorney and partner for the firm representing the plaintiffs, in a news release.

County officials understood the flood barriers in Pacific, installed more than 15 years ago, were designed only as a temporary solution. Left in place years past their advertised life span, however, they were degrading. Similarly, they understood another levee in Tukwila was weak. Local officials had repeatedly asked for urgent repairs that never came.

Both levee failures were “predictable, foreseeable, and, indeed, anticipated,” the lawsuit argues.

Ready to fight

The group of residents first gathered in early January, brought together by Pacific City Councilperson Lawrence Boles and his wife Jacqualine Savanna Boles. The couple hosted the meeting at their church in Kent, where lawyers from the California firm Rosen Saba advised them of their options.

The Boleses were one of the estimated 220 families ousted during the flood in Pacific. Further north, the levee breach in Tukwila had sparked a widespread evacuation, but waters from the Green River there largely mostly inundated an industrial and commercial area.

Families at the January meeting were still living in hotels, short-term rentals or crashing with friends and family. Most everybody described tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to their homes, vehicles and belongings.

Many didn’t have flood insurance because their homes sit outside the federally drawn flood plain. They described a sense of anger and betrayal at a government system that failed to keep them safe.

The families spoke of lingering nightmares, trauma and despair. Their children struggled to understand the gravity of the situation. They worried about mold and other health problems alongside long-term structural damage to their homes.

The lawyers at the time said they were exploring legal options and the greater their number, the better chance they’d have. Even so, a lawsuit would be likely to last a long time and restitution would be by no means guaranteed, they said.

“I’m ready to fight,” Lawrence Boles said during the meeting.

In all, 80 people and three businesses signed onto the lawsuit, which the lawyers — partnering with the local firm Ogden Murphy Wallace — filed Monday.

The defendants

The lawsuit in King County Superior Court names both the county and its flood control district as defendants. Both have been tight-lipped since the levees broke open. While King County owns the flood control infrastructure itself, the flood control district is the entity responsible to fund maintenance and repairs.

County officials deferred comment on the new lawsuit to the district, which did not respond to inquiries about the complaint. In the months after the floods, district officials repeatedly avoided questions on why the flood barriers in Pacific failed. They have no plan in place for a permanent solution.

“Flooding along any river reflects a complex set of factors, including changing river dynamics, infrastructure limitations and resource constraints over time,” Flood Control District Executive Director Michelle Clark said in an email nearly a week before the suit was filed. “The District is actively working with multiagency partners to assess conditions, respond to immediate needs and find interim and long-term solutions.”

The county installed a series of so-called HESCO barriers between Pacific and the White River after floods in 2009 poured over earthen levees there and into the city’s neighborhoods. The new barriers, a line of large felt and wire cubes filled with sand, have an advertised life span of five years but they’ve remained in place much longer than that. These are the barriers that failed in mid-December. Emergency crews plugged the hole with more HESCO barriers.

The lawsuit also mentions the earthen levee in Tukwila that failed just hours earlier. Similarly, that stretch of earthen barrier, called the Desimone levee, had failed before.

Not only did local officials from Tukwila, Renton and Kent ask the flood district last summer to immediately prioritize repairs but county officials reported months earlier described the levee’s weakened state as the “most important issue” on the Green River’s lower reach. Still, substantive fixes never came.

Asked specifically about the breach in Pacific, King County Councilperson Reagan Dunn, who also chairs the Flood Control District, offered a brief statement through a spokesperson on April 7.

“The December 2025 flood was a one-in-a-200-year flood event, and it laid bare a number of inadequacies in our flood protection system that we are working very hard to correct for future floods,” Dunn said.

What’s next?

The defendants' attorneys have yet to respond to the lawsuit. In the meantime, they are discussing how to prepare ahead of this year’s rainy season.

District officials met in April and discussed supplemental funding requests for emergency repairs along the county’s most severely damaged flood barriers. These include the Desimone levee and the HESCO barriers in Pacific.

However, the damage well exceeds the amount of work the county can finish in a single year. Staff told the district’s executive committee during the meeting that about a third of King County’s flood protection infrastructure took on damage during the floods. More damage is likely to be discovered this summer when rivers and streams run lower so crews can see more of the levees, they said.

To date, local, county or state officials can’t say how many people have been able to return home in Pacific or quantify the damage done to homes or businesses.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson estimated the total damage to public infrastructure at more than $182 million. So far the state has earmarked $3.5 million for individual aid.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Saturday that it would unlock federal money for recovery assistance but it did not specify how much money would be made available to the state or any of the people hurt by the floods.

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