Last week’s flood didn’t just test Skagit County’s levees. It tested how we communicate risk in a valley where the water moves one way, the maps say another, and La Conner sits awkwardly in between.
On Wednesday night, when Skagit County sent a Level 3 “Evacuate immediately” alert for everyone in the 100-year floodplain, La Conner’s emergency managers held firm at Level 2 “Be ready.” Residents were left asking: Do we leave now, or do we wait? Who do we trust?
For a town that did not flood — where king tides stayed below the boardwalk and the Channel never overtopped — that tension was real, and it was rooted in one simple problem:
Our official flood tools don’t match our on-the-ground reality.
KARI MARForty-year-old maps in a very different valley
Skagit County is still working off FEMA flood maps that are roughly 40 years old. They were drawn before:
- Mount Vernon built its FEMA-grade floodwall
- Fir Island dikes were widened and strengthened after the 1990 flood
- Hydrology shifted under decades of logging, development and climate change and
- Local communities refined their understanding of how water actually moves through the delta.
Those old maps don’t distinguish between river towns that sit right on the Skagit and tidal towns like La Conner that sit on the Swinomish Channel, separated from the river by miles of farmland and multiple dike systems.
So when the county hits “send” on a major alert based on those maps, La Conner gets treated the same as a home next to the main river channel — even though our risk unfolds differently and on a different timeline.
“All the dikes you can get to easily now”
Farmer Alan Mesman has seen that change firsthand since the 1990 flood.
“Since the 1990–91 flood, a tremendous amount of work has been done on the dikes,” he told La Conner Community News. “The Fir Island dike has been made a lot stronger and wider and heavier. Access to the dikes has improved. We didn’t use to have all these side roads going out to dikes and getting on dikes, and that’s a big thing.”
That access matters. With more roads and better patrol routes, crews can now spot and fix small problems before they become disasters.
In other words: the physical system has changed. The protections are stronger. The way we manage and patrol the dikes is more sophisticated. But the maps — and the alerts that depend on them — still behave as if it’s 1985.
A patchwork of protection around La Conner
Add to that our patchwork of dike governance.
Messman notes that Sullivan Slough’s dikes are a mix: the east side of Sullivan Slough down to Hedlin’s and south of Chilberg Road is Dike District 9, while south of Chilberg, on the other side of the slough, the dike is entirely private, maintained by local families.
La Conner’s fate, then, depends on a combination of:
- Public dike districts with taxing authority
- Privately maintained levees
- The timing of river crests at Concrete and Mount Vernon, and
- The rhythm of tides in the Swinomish Channel
That’s a lot of moving parts to reduce to a single color on a FEMA map or a single line in a push alert.
The editorial dilemma: how do we tell you the truth in real time?
When the county tells you to evacuate immediately, and the town says be ready but stay put for now, your local newspaper is standing right in that gap.
Our job is not to pick sides. Our job is to explain why La Conner is included in the county’s Level 3 alert (because the maps say so), why local officials believe Level 2 is more appropriate for the moment (because our risk is indirect and delayed) and what conditions would change that calculus (a dike failure in the right — or wrong — place).
We have to do that while the river is still rising, while roads are closing in a “halo” around town, and while residents are deciding whether to wake kids, pack pets, and drive into the storm or wait for daylight.
That’s not just a communications challenge. It’s an ethical one.
Stronger dikes, clearer risk, better maps
The story Mesman tells is not a story of complacency. It’s a story of investment:
- Stronger, wider, heavier dikes on Fir Island
- Better access roads and patrols
- Fewer leaks and fewer emergency sandbag ring operations
That work should make us safer. But it should also make our risk more precise. Right now, the system doesn’t reward that nuance; it flattens it.
I’m not arguing for rosy messaging. La Conner’s risk is real. If certain dikes fail or are overtopped with historic rains, we could see water here hours later. Our evacuation routes could be cut off even if our streets stay dry. We live downstream of a powerful river system in a time of intensifying storms.
But precision in communication matters: for families deciding whether to evacuate at midnight or at 7 a.m., for farmers deciding where to move equipment and livestock and for businesses choosing whether to close, board up or stay open.
And it matters for trust. If every storm is communicated as “everyone leave now,” regardless of how the water actually behaves, people will eventually tune out even the warnings that truly are urgent.
What needs to change
We need:
- Updated FEMA maps that reflect modern levees, local hydrology, and climate realities
- Alert systems that distinguish between riverine and tidal risk and acknowledge lag times from dike failure to town flooding
- A formal role for local expertise — dike commissioners, farmers like Messman, tribal staff, emergency managers — in shaping how risk is described to the public.
Until then, we will keep doing what small-town journalism does best:
Walking the waterfront at king tide.
Talking to the people who build and patrol the dikes and have local knowledge you can’t find on websites or encoded in vintage maps.
Reading the alerts — all of them — and asking, “What does this actually mean here?”
When the maps are 40 years old, the water is changing, and your town sits in the gray area between “flood plain” and “still dry,” good information is not a luxury.
It’s part of the levee system.
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
