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This month, President Trump approved disaster funding to help people in the Pacific Northwest recover from major flooding in December. Washington's governor has called the flood the state's costliest natural disaster. It forced thousands of people to evacuate. North of Seattle, a tribal community is working to lessen the toll of future floods by restoring habitat for fish. KUOW's John Ryan reports.
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JOHN RYAN, BYLINE: Scott Boyd is walking through deep mud where the Stillaguamish River empties into the Pacific Ocean. This flood-prone river mouth north of Seattle changed dramatically last fall. That's when the Stillaguamish Tribe removed 2 miles of earthen levee that kept the river and the tides from spreading onto nearby farmland.
SCOTT BOYD: Well before, it was a dairy operation, and now it's a big tidal marsh.
RYAN: Boyd is a Stillaguamish tribal member and fisheries manager. Over the past two decades, the small tribe has purchased a couple thousand acres of land for fish and wildlife. Like many tribes, the Stillaguamish signed a treaty with the U.S. giving up almost all of their land, but they kept their rights to fish and hunt.
BOYD: It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow to buy back the land that we essentially traded for the resource, the fish, but it's what we have to do to get things back on track.
RYAN: What the tribe wants back on track is salmon. Decades of environmental damage have left many salmon runs on the brink of extinction. Last year, so few Chinook salmon returned to the Stillaguamish River that the tribe was only allowed to catch 26 fish. Tidal marshes are crucial nurseries for Chinook salmon, so the tribe has been buying riverfront land and removing levees to turn farmland into wetland. Here's Scott Boyd.
BOYD: Salmon has always been important to our people, to the tribe, to our way of life, and these habitat projects are the best bang for our buck.
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RYAN: Jason Griffith is a biologist for the tribe. He says a lot of the river's floodwater now can dissipate harmlessly.
JASON GRIFFITH: Now the river can connect to its floodplain like it hasn't in 140 years.
RYAN: Before the tribe removed the old levee, they built a new one farther back from the Stillaguamish River.
GRIFFITH: By giving the river more space, we are reducing the damage and the expense to society to maintain infrastructure. It's cheaper to maintain if you stay further away.
RYAN: But there are always trade-offs with changing land use.
TYLER BREUM: As a farmer, it's always hard to see farmland go.
RYAN: Tyler Breum grows potatoes and seed crops a few miles north of the new wetland.
BREUM: Food needs to come from somewhere, and we live in an area where we can grow quality food about as cheap as you can grow it.
RYAN: Breum says levees, like the one he's standing on next to his farm, make life in the floodplain possible.
BREUM: It protects everything that my family has. And then there's a lot of people who live down here in the floodplain.
RYAN: The county says if that levee fails, 1,000 people would be displaced. During last December's floods, Breum spent an anxious night riding his all-terrain vehicle on the levee.
BREUM: Every couple hours, I was just going back and forth on a four-wheeler, just checking water levels on the outside, making sure nothing was going through the dike or overtopping the dike.
RYAN: He had reason to worry. That levee sprang a leak during a flood four years ago. Luckily, a duck hunter noticed, and repair crews fixed it before disaster struck. Breum says he supports removing some levees to make room for salmon, as long as farmers benefit too.
BREUM: The people who farm down there near where the tribe did their project, they got a brand-new world-class dike. I'm jealous of it when I drive by it.
RYAN: The new levee stands 4 feet taller than the old one. That could help farms nearby survive the bigger floods expected with the changing climate.
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RYAN: The Stillaguamish Tribe has restored hundreds of acres of tidal habitat so far. Scientists say it will take thousands of acres for Chinook salmon to fully recover. For NPR News, I'm John Ryan on the Stillaguamish River.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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