More than 80 plaintiffs filed suit Monday alleging that county officials knew their levee systems were failing and caused damage to homes and businesses.
PACIFIC, Wash. — Sharon Flannery was asleep when she heard the helicopter in the early hours of Dec. 16, 2025.
"Evacuate now. Evacuate now."
The 30-year Pacific resident grabbed her oxygen tank, her medications, and a half-packed suitcase and made it to her garage where 5 inches of cold, dark water was already rising.
She drove 75 yards before her car died. She was rescued by boat, pulled through a door as freezing water gushed in around her.
Five days passed before she could go home.
"I don't want to move," Flannery said this week, four months after the flood. "I couldn't sell my house right now. Nobody'd buy it."
On Monday, Flannery became one of 83 named plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was filed in King County Superior Court against the King County Flood Control District (KCFCD) — a legal action that lays out in striking detail what residents say is not a story about a catastrophic storm but about years of "government inaction, bureaucratic failure," and a disaster that court documents describe as not just foreseeable, but anticipated.
KING 5 obtained a copy of the complaint ahead of Monday's court filing. Eighty residents are listed as plaintiffs in the complaint along with three businesses in Pacific. More people can join the list of plaintiffs, who are represented by Seattle-based law firm Ogden Murphy Wallace.
Rosen Saba, LLP, which is based in El Segundo, Calif. and working with the Seattle firm, called a town hall meeting to hear from residents in January.
“This wasn’t just a storm—it was a failure of infrastructure the County knew was at risk,” Ryan Saba of Rosen Saba said in a statement.
This is a mass tort listed as an inverse condemnation legal action. Under Washington state law, inverse condemnation occurs when the government constructively takes real property even though formal eminent domain proceedings are not actually taken against the subject property. The seller must have a judgment against the governmental entity, or a court approved settlement, based upon inverse condemnation to claim the exemption.
A disaster allegedly years in the making
In the early hours of Dec. 16, 2025, temporary barriers known as HESCO barriers — installed along the White River in Pacific in 2008 as short-term flood protection — collapsed under the pressure of a historic atmospheric river event. What began as a single failing unit cascaded into a multi-barrier breach, sending floodwaters surging into a community that sits outside the defined flood plain and had been told for years that it was protected.
The day before, on Dec. 15, the Green River's Desimone levee — an earthen barrier near Tukwila with a documented history of failure stretching back nearly six decades — had already given way, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents and businesses east of the river in the Orillia area in Tukwila, Renton and Kent.
Two levee failures in two rivers occurred fewer than 24 hours apart.
The lawsuit alleges neither failure was a surprise.
“The County had years to fix these levees,” said Robert Curtis of Foley Bezek Behle & Curtis, which is one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs. “Instead, they left communities exposed and damaged. This was a preventable tragedy."
HESCO barriers have a typical field life of roughly five years. Pacific Mayor Vic Kave told KING 5 in March that many of the barriers bordering Pacific City Park were twice their intended lifespan or more.
In an April 1, 2026, meeting the King County Flood Control District (KCFCD) said it received "an in-depth briefing on recovery."
According to the summary on the district's website, Michelle Clark, executive director of the KCFCD, and Laura Bradstreet, river and floodplain management section manager in King County’s Water and Land Resources Division, both presented to the Executive Committee.
"The committee was reminded that the December event was severe and historic," Steven Schauer, KCFCD deputy executive director, said in an April 9 blog post. "It triggered the longest Flood Warning Center activation in at least 40 years, and five of King County’s six rivers reached Phase 4 flood conditions. After inspecting flood protection facilities in January, County staff found that 163 facilities — about one-third of the system — sustained damage."
A 2018 Army Corps of Engineers report identified multiple components of the Desimone levee as "minimally acceptable" — the bare threshold for safety.
The King County Flood District's own website acknowledges the need to, in its words, improve the county's "aging and inadequate flood protection facilities."
In the complaint, the plaintiffs claim the "two critical levee" systems failing between Dec. 15 and 16 caused "extensive damage to the surrounding communities, including Plaintiffs' properties. These failures were the predictable, foreseeable, and, indeed, anticipated consequences of defendants King County Flood Control District and King County's (collectively, 'Defendants') deliberate decisions to operate deficient public infrastructure without completing necessary repairs or upgrades."
'They were supposed to fix it'
For residents like Flannery and her neighbor Bob Jewett, the legal filings confirm what they say they already knew.
Jewett had his 5- and 6-year-old grandchildren with him the night of the evacuation. Floodwaters trapped and totaled his wife's vehicle. Between a new car, new flooring, insulation, and structural repairs, Jewett estimates his out-of-pocket losses at roughly $60,000. He and his family spent two weeks in a hotel before it was safe to return home.
"They were supposed to fix it," Jewett said. "It's been 17 years."
According to the complaint, repair efforts on the Desimone levee stalled for years in a "bureaucratic dispute" between King County, the flood district and the Army Corps of Engineers over "land acquisition and project scope."
Limits of federal relief
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump issued a federal disaster declaration for King County and several other Washington counties, opening the door to FEMA assistance for affected residents. But the relief may fall far short of what many families need. The current cap on individual FEMA assistance applications is approximately $43,600 — less than Jewett's losses alone, and a figure that doesn't begin to cover the situation facing some of his neighbors.
Four months after the flood, some Pacific families still cannot return to their homes. The properties are either too unsafe to occupy or too damaged to repair without money they don't have.
"It's terrible," Jewett said. "Where are they at? Are they going to be homeless? Are they going to live with their families the rest of their lives?"
King County's response
Reagan Dunn, who chairs the King County Flood Control District Executive Committee and represents the area as a King County council member, provided a statement to KING 5: "The December 2025 flood was a one-in-200-year event, and it laid bare inadequacies in our flood protection system that we are working hard to correct."
The Board of Supervisors for KCFCD elects five members of the board to serve on the executive committee.
The 83 plaintiffs are seeking compensation for destroyed property, lost wages, business interruption, and relocation costs.
The King County Flood Control District's executive director and deputy director have not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
For Flannery, the plaintiff who was rescued in the flooding, the lawsuit is less about money than about accountability and a community that was promised protection it never received.
She just finished replacing her floors this week trying to avoid a mold problem from the flood water that reached her home.
"Sandbags don't do any good," she said. "All you can do is try to protect things."