Will flood of concrete increase floods?

Originally published Saturday, September 26, 1998

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

At the north end of town, farmland and suburbia exist on opposite sides of Cherry Valley Road, where the pungent odor of a dairy farm wafts uphill, puckering homeowners' nostrils in Cherry Brooke subdivision.

Some residents worry about what impact residential development will have on water runoff into the frequently flooded Snoqualmie Valley.

"I'm waiting for winter to see what all the construction has done and will do to the river -- whether it'll flood a lot easier and a lot quicker," says Val Roney, whose husband Ward Roney's family has farmed in the valley since 1912.

"I'm very concerned that we have decreased the trees and have a lot more cement, and that it's going to contribute a lot more to flooding."

Farming, once the Duvall area's mainstay, has not only diminished but changed drastically. Gone are most of the dairy farms that once dominated the lower valley.

Wood products companies have turned much of the lower Snoqualmie Valley into a plantation: fast-growing poplar trees, to be harvested for pulp, now occupy hundreds of acres.