1615 RAINIER AVE 2022-05-06 - Laserfiche WebLink

Good day City Council Members, My name is Loralee Swale and I live at 1615 Rainier Ave in Everett. My house was one of many affected by the flooding on August 29th and I'm writing to you to explain what happened in,our basement that evening. I've also attached a few pictures to help show a portion of what the damage looked like. My husband, brother-in-law and I came home very late the evening of the 29th from a Seahawk game to find our basement in 8-10 inches of water. This does not include the soaking height of water in our drywall—which ended up being over a foot. We immediately started bailing water out our basement door and did the best we could to clean up that night at 1 am. The rest of the water we had to just wait until morning to see if it would drain. Thankfully, we do not have a fully finished basement and the damages were minimal. However, my brother-in-law had a finished bedroom along with a finished bathroom that was ruined. The water got high enough to damage our boiler for our radiant heating system,the washer and dryer, and a few other items (in the main basement area). Friday morning, August 30th, we made the necessary steps to start clean up and file a claim with the city. The workers advised us to document all items damaged and not throw anything away until an assessor could come out and speak with us. Corey Brown, our assessor, came out on September 5th along with Brian Doulin(I'm unsure of the spelling in the last name) from Public Works. Brian inspected our backwater valve,which was installed 2 years ago, and stated everything seemed to be working fine but was unsure as to how the flood back up could have occurred in our home. Corey was extremely kind and kept in touch with us over the following couple weeks and informed us the city was paying out the claims to the homes where the least damage occurred first. He stated ours would be coming up shortly and we should find a contractor to come over and give an estimate on damage repair, a boiler technician to give an estimate and fix our boiler, and explained the process of either hiring a cleanup crew to remove any mold/further water damage or doing the work ourselves. On Friday October 4th a boiler technician from Northwest Mechanical came to repair our boiler for$969.42. October 10th we received a letter from the city stating our claim had been denied, yet the decision date was made September 18th—3 weeks prior to receiving the denial letter. The letter stated denial due to the City's inspection of our home in 2011, in which they said we "could" (not"should") disconnect our gutters from the side sewer to possibly deter any flooding issues from happening in the future (there were no issues of flooding in our home prior to this incidence). The denial also stated the following: "It is probable that, during the 2013 storm event, the downspouts were unable to discharge into the side sewer because the side sewer was full, causing the gutters/downspouts to overflow and sending water toward your basement." I called Brian from Public Works and asked if he could shed some light on the claim denial and if he thought the flooding would have still occurred, had we disconnected the gutters. He stated