Where does the water go? Nooksack River flood recovery is complicated

As they race to protect themselves against the next catastrophic flood, communities along the Nooksack River are caught in a pressure cooker.

Up the river that weaves through forests and farmlands from the foot of Mount Baker to Bellingham Bay in Puget Sound, Bruce Bosch has told many he fears he could be the last Mayor of Sumas," as the border town regroups months after its second catastrophic flood in less than five years.

Smaller cities like Sumas and its neighbor Everson want to increase the river's capacity.

But doing so could risk sending more water to downstream communities like Lummi Nation, effectively turned into an island several times a year when flooding swallows its main roads.

Each community wants to work together, but "the upstream people need to know that we're going to do our best to protect our people too," said Frank Lawrence, Lummi Nation's natural resources deputy director, echoing sentiment from nearby Ferndale.

Meanwhile, the amount of wind and rain atmospheric rivers deliver could double in the coming years, according to a 2018 NASA study.

While the clock ticks, communities must compete for limited project money, complicated by debates about protecting in-stream salmon habitat. What works for one area could make flooding worse for others. Any solution may be years away.

It's a quandary that starts upstream and flows down.

How Nooksack got squeezed

For decades, communities have built levees and revetments to protect expanding human habitat, said Whatcom County flood manager Paula Harris.

The riverside armoring chokes sediment from dispersing downriver, feeding gravel bars that squeeze the Nooksack, especially in Everson. When the river floods, it overtops its banks and flows into low-lying northern cities such as Sumas. The river overall has been narrowing by 20 feet per decade between 2006 and 2024, said county spokesperson Riley Sweeney.

Private gravel companies removed sediment from the river until the late 1990s, when environmental regulations changed to protect fish habitat. Since then, "dredging" has been strictly regulated per the county's shoreline code.

Local tribes with legally reserved fishing rights are also trying to protect endangered salmon runs, whose spawning beds, shelter and eggs would be destroyed if sediment were scraped away.

But calls to "Dredge the Nooksack" were re-energized after the November 2021 flood. Months after the 2025 flooding, increasingly desperate residents in Sumas and Everson are urging officials to do something - anything.

Every time it rains in Sumas, children cry, Mayor Bruce Bosch said.

Numerous families left after the previous big flood. Many of those who stayed have lost their spirit to rebuild.

And if nothing is done, the problem's going to get worse, Harris told the county council at a meeting in February. According to a Floodplain Integrated Planning report last year, flood levels could increase 2 to 5 feet over the next 35 years.

Community leaders estimated that more than 850 households across Whatcom County had their homes significantly damaged by last year's flood, as well as 60 businesses. Seventy-five percent of homes in Sumas alone were damaged, with city infrastructure suffering a $4 million hit, while Everson saw up to $40 million in damage across 150 homes, businesses and the city hall.

"We plead to your hearts, to your minds, to just help do whatever you can," Sumas resident Ryan Wittig said before the county council. "We've worked our butts off to just be here, and we want to continue to be in this town."

Increasing the river's capacity

At minimum, Bosch wants a new levee built for temporary short-term protection, and Everson Mayor John Perry wants a six-foot ring dike around his city to offset the river capacity lost to sediment infill.

But those protections could fail and risk a blowout that could cause the river to carve a new path toward Canada, Perry said.

Most of all, upstream communities want the county to increase river capacity by removing silt, gravel and vegetation in side channels where the sediment has filled in, thus theoretically not disturbing in-stream fish habitat, Perry said.

But if the river's upstream capacity is increased, a process known as "rechannelization," it'll mean more water for downstream communities.

Bosch and Perry want solutions that work for all communities. But Perry lamented that "the fear of sending more water downstream and increasing the downstream flood risk has created an environment of fear of doing anything."

Some don't want to 'squeeze the balloon'

Downstream, communities must balance their own interests with those of their neighbors.

Lummi Nation families lived by the river in the 1960s and '70s, but had to move upland as flooding increased.

Even now, floodwaters inundate the reservation's main routes as many as three times a year for several days at a time, cutting Lummi Nation residents off from grocery stores and the hospital, said Lawrence.

The Tribe is open to solutions, but "We don't need more water down here and we don't need more sediment," Lawrence said.

Mayor Greg Hansen of Ferndale, just north of Bellingham, doesn't want to see the county "squeeze the balloon," meaning that if "you fix the problem in Nooksack, you create a problem somewhere else."

Hansen is working on a significant levee reconstruction to protect downtown Ferndale and its wastewater treatment plant. Lummi Nation wants new functional tide gates to "help drain the tub" by releasing excess floodwater against the tides, Lawrence said.

But if the river capacity is increased upstream, downstream communities want their projects implemented and synchronized at the same time for protection.

While leaders from each community convene at Floodplain Integration Planning team meetings and say they're playing along well and supporting one another, the real fight has not yet begun, as the discussion about prioritizing projects is just beginning - and how to fund them.

"It's going to be a fight for the money," Hansen said.

From permits to fish habitats, challenges abound

The numerous flooding solutions are "clearly not going to happen all at once," county flood manager Harris said.

State budgets are tight, and even short-term solutions are competing with asks from nearly a dozen counties, said Whatcom County executive Satpal Sidhu.

Ferndale's levee reconstruction alone has to be divided among three rounds of funding, Harris said, so the county is on the lookout for any state and federal dollars, or anything collected in a "coffee can out on the corner."

The county has estimated that implementing long-term solutions around the river could roughly cost $474 million. And that's including a lot of assumptions and unknowns, spokesperson Sweeney said.

But even if there were enough money, it could take years just to get through the proper permitting.

The river, under jurisdiction of the state and federal government, is protected hunting grounds for the local tribes who have veto power over federal permits, said county public works special projects manager Roland Middleton.

The Nooksack Tribe, for whom the river is named, declined an interview with The Seattle Times.

In the long term, Lummi Nation wants to see levee setbacks to widen the channel instead of rechannelization. Its northerly neighbors and the county agree upon the idea, but not as a singular solution.

The county said rechannelization could restore fish habitat, though it's too early to know for sure. But Lummi Nation worries that altering the river that way could adversely impact in-stream salmon habitat.

"Salmon is our indicator species," said Lawrence of Lummi Nation. "If the salmon is doing well, then we're doing well."

The endangered fish not only have physical significance to the Tribe as a food source, but spiritual and cultural" meaning as well, Lawrence said. Lummi Nation's oral tradition relies on salmon, so good stories about the species mean happy people, but telling bad stories could bring down morale.

"If the stories start disappearing about salmon," Lawrence said, "then maybe we'll start disappearing too."

Time runs thin

One way or another, relief from flood risk could be years away, with projects only in early planning stages. That's longer than some are willing to wait.

For some, the first lifeboats came as federal grants to lift homes in the flood plain or buyouts to help families relocate.

"But there again, you're treating the symptom," Perry said.

The county is interested in widening the river corridor with both levee setbacks and rechannelization, Harris told the council at the February meeting.

But rechannelization could take as long as five years, Harris guesstimated when the council asked about the timeline. Project scopes and partial designs need to be detailed before they can be funded, and the habitat benefits for salmon are yet unknown.

Perry said he doesn't expect to see mitigation projects completed before the next major flood.

Meanwhile, for months, the Wittigs have been crammed in a camper outside their mucked-out home in Sumas, which has been flooded twice in four years.

The Wittigs were recently approved for a grant to elevate their home, and Ryan Wittig expects to be able to move his family back inside by Christmas.

A few blocks away, Diane Ackerman might not be so lucky. She and her dog Sadie are staying in a camper Wittig helped her set up outside her childhood home.

She was born there, raised her children there and lived and baked cookies there alone until three feet of water came in December.

Now it's torn down to the bone.

Ackerman, 64, mustered a slight smile as she passed through the cold, gutted home reminiscing about the custom furniture she'd lost. She pointed out where her old room used to be, where her son's was.

There were no walls to hide one room from the next.

In the shadow of an inevitable next flood, the house was looking less like a home. She mused about moving to Florida or Georgia, where she has family, if she doesn't get money for an elevation.

But she wasn't making any plans. She's been too tired.

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