Nine years ago, Jim and Billie Fugate moved from their home of 29 years on Lea Hill to a house on Pike Street just where it curves into 12th Street.<\/p>\n
Their backyard overlooks a pretty bend of the Green River north of Porter Bridge, and from their deck the couple can watch the river flow past, marvel at the leaping salmon and count their luck.<\/p>\n
Fugate, a former superintendent of the Auburn School District, never tires of looking.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the fish first started coming up a month ago, you couldn\u2019t see the bottom of the river,\u201d said Fugate.<\/p>\n
The river is a wonderful part of the Fugates\u2019 lives. But evidence of its fiercer side is there, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee that sand bar up in the grass there?\u201d said Fugate, pointing to the opposite bank of the river. \u201cThat sucker is about four feet deep, and it wasn\u2019t there a year ago at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Savvy to the flood danger posed by the compromised holding capacity of the Howard Hanson Dam this season, Fugate wants to protect his riverbank home from possible damage this fall and winter.<\/p>\n
As the long list of crossed-out to-dos on his yellow pad attests, he\u2019s been extremely industrious about it. And what he couldn\u2019t do for himself, he hired others to do for him.<\/p>\n
There was the surveyor he brought out to complete work necessary to make him eligible for flood insurance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was the only one along this street who did that, and I still don\u2019t understand why. The insurance only runs about $350 a year, and it\u2019s $250,000 on the house and $100,000 on the contents,\u201d Fugate said.<\/p>\n
Fugate brought another fellow to the house to check the crawl space, to make sure the Visqueen plastic sheeting was in good shape and that his duct work and insulation were up and where they were supposed to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf water gets in there, it may be vulnerable,\u201d said Fugate. \u201cMost crawl spaces are about 3 feet high. If your duct work is down too low or the insulation is loose, you\u2019re going to be replacing that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He designed covers for his air vents and a friend cut them for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI put this handle on it to make it easier to put on and pull out,\u201d Fugate said, pulling one off the work bench. \u201cSee that, it snaps right into there.\u201d<\/p>\n
He will secure the cover to his air vents with sealant.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a common-sense thing. I show [the covers] to my neighbors, and they say \u2018That\u2019s a good idea.\u2019 I\u2019ve got a buddy next door, an old bachelor, and I try get him do him do everything I\u2019m doing because he\u2019s as vulnerable as I am,\u201d Fugate said.<\/p>\n
He brought someone out from J and M Construction to install a backflow valve on his sewer pipe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe city has made it so you don\u2019t even have to get a permit to put it in. It costs about $37. As long as the flow is going out, the flapper stays open, but it shuts on anything that tries to come back up. He put it in for $87. He\u2019s a handy guy who does all kinds of things. He put that sucker in there in 45 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fugate lifted a plastic sheet in his garage revealing a pallet of sandbags.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got 100 sandbags there. I got them from the Bag Lady in Puyallup. They delivered the pallet using a forklift. The guy said to be sure to cover them because the material is very vulnerable to ultraviolet rays. They should last five years at a minimum. Over here I\u2019ve got some different shapes, some 60-pound and some 40-pound bags.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll put them where they\u2019ll do the most good.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey tell us we are going to be as vulnerable from the street as from the river. This is the crawl space entry, so those bigger bags I will probably use them around here. Another thing is I had the washer and drier vented out there. I had a guy out and he put the vent on top, and there\u2019s flexible tubing so it vents out there, and I just duct tape over it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fugate even brought professionals in to mark his irrigation heads with little red flags.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s so when the people scheduled to come in to shore up the yard with sandbags arrive, they won\u2019t have to guess where the heads are,\u201d Fugate said.<\/p>\n
About a quarter mile away, Riverview Drive resident Len Elliot is also preparing his home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve got things at the lower level of my house that I will be moving. I haven\u2019t got a whole lot of room in my house. I\u2019m sitting at a higher elevation than other folks, but it\u2019s still going to come in my back yard,\u201d said Elliot.<\/p>\n
\u201cWater coming by at 12,000 cubic feet per second is only a foot or two below the top of the [Dykstra] levee, and they are talking about 17,000 cubic feet per second, which puts it over the top as far as I am concerned. I bought flood insurance, so I will protect myself that way, but I don\u2019t know what else to do. I\u2019m thinking sandbags. I\u2019m concerned. I have talked to my neighbors, and they have bought flood insurance. The corps has said they are working on this, but how complex can it be?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nine years ago, Jim and Billie Fugate moved from their home of 29 years on Lea Hill to a house on Pike Street just where it curves into 12th Street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":17698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17697"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}