Eastsiders have come to love the sound of tow trucks in the morning.

They have been working with Tacoma Police Department Officer Don Williams to rid the neighborhood of illegal and decaying cars in all the wrong places.

They’ve alerted Williams to blocks clogged with cars on the planting strips, cars with grass growing in their wheel wells, cars with expired tabs, cars on lawns, cars on sidewalks, cars parked facing the wrong way. Williams checks off the pertinent violation on a form. He leaves the form on the windshield with a notice that, if the owner doesn’t move the car by a certain date, the city will do it, and send a bill.

The first time Williams went out, people thought it was a bluff.
Then big trucks towed 30-plus cars away.

The next few times around, owners dealt with the problem themselves, and the tow trucks hauled off half a dozen vehicles.
Now Tow Day is going city-wide.

Jeanie Peterson of Hilltop Action Coalition is inviting volunteers in Sector One, which includes Hilltop and the downtown, to get the training to hit the sidewalks for the program. The police will offer free training sessions the weekend of Dec. 6 and 7.

“The first training class for the 6th will begin at noon at the Sector One Substation, South 16th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and other trainings will happen throughout the day,” she said.
Tow Day will come to Sector One in time for the holidays, then cycle through Sectors Two and Three, then back to Four.

Don't plan on using Broadway between Second and Sixth in Tacoma on Thursday -- unless it's raining. Crews are planning to pave the street as part of the big make-over of the area. Here's the press release from the city:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nov. 18, 2008

MEDIA CONTACTS
Karrie Spitzer, Community Relations, karrie.spitzer@cityoftacoma.org, (253) 591-5790
Mark Henry, Public Works, mark.henry@cityoftacoma.org, (253) 591-5771

Broadway paving scheduled for Nov. 20
Broadway, from 2nd to 6 streets, is scheduled to be paved on Thursday, Nov. 20, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. No access will be allowed on Broadway while the paving is underway. The parking areas along Broadway, from 2nd to 6th, will remain closed until all paving for this area is complete; the paving is scheduled to be done on Tuesday, Nov. 25.

This work, which is weather dependent, is part of phase one of the Broadway Local Improvement District (BLID) project.

The Broadway LID includes portions of Market Street and St. Helens Avenue, between South 9th and South 7th streets, together with portions of Broadway from South 9th Street northward towards South 2nd Street. Over the next year, the area will continue to undergo: reconstruction and repair of sidewalks; the addition of ornamental street lighting and landscaping; construction of surface water, wastewater and water main utility replacement and the undergrounding of overhead utility wires.

For more information about the project, visit www.cityoftacoma.org/BroadwayLID.

Standing in his front yard on the levee next to the Carbon River, Don Heins recalled the sound of the Veterans Day storm last week ripping at the levee.

"It was about 1:30 or 2 in the morning," he said this morning as he watched the jaws of a big excavator pull trees from the levee. "I thought it was big boulders going downstream."

When he got up last Thursday morning, he saw what happened. The river had torn out about 25 feet of levee bank. The large rocks that held the levee were gone, swept away by the rain swollen river. In their place was a vertical wall of dirt, about 5 feet tall.

If he had known that was happening, he said he would have got out of there in the night. He said he is used to big rocks rolling down the river "shaking the ground."

"It's the first time that has happened," he said of the washout since he moved next to the river south of Orting in 1977.

The excavator was part of a Pierce County Surface Water Management crew repairing the 300-foot-long cut in the levee. A second levee gash about a quarter-mile downstream also threatened the Foothills Trail.

Work on the Foothills Trail repair is expected to start Wednesday, according to Mike Dacca, who is overseeing the repairs there for Pierce County.

He said the trail will have to be shut down for perhaps a week and half at milepost 4.3 to do the work.

Those repairs are among at least 10 active repair sites that will be under way in the next few days in the Orting area along the Puyallup and Carbon rivers. There are more than 30 sites that need work, though not all are an emergency, according to Tony Fantello, maintenance and operations manager for the county's Surface Water Management.

Fantello said it appears the weather will give them enough time to get the most vulnerable sites repaired before the next heavy rains.

“We’d be more worried if we had another storm of equal magnitude on its way,” he said.

Besides the work on the Carbon River levee at 186th Street East, repair work in winding down on the Carbon River levee south of Orting along 177th Street East (the Alward County Road). Emergency work started there last Thursday, according to Dacca.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also finishing up flood repair work on the Puyallup River along Neadham Road south of Orting. Repairs there have been under way 24/7 since last Wednesday.

Fantello said the county is finishing up assessing public damage from last week’s flooding and will prioritize the repairs that must be done.
He estimated river repairs cost $3.5 million a year.

The Veterans Day Storm filled area rivers and led to evacuation of homes in areas south of Orting, South Prairie and Sumner.

The state's Voights Creek Fish Hatchery south of Orting was flooded last week, too, by the creek.

Hatchery manager Jill Phillips said today they are still trying to clear water intake pipes from Voights Creek to the hatchery. A tracked excavator was almost in the creek pulling gravel out and dumping it into waiting trucks.

She said they have kept water flowing to more than 1/5 million salmon and steelhead fry and another 2 million eggs using generators. If the water stops flowing, the fry and eggs will die, she said.

"We need to get the gravel out of the intakes," Phillips said.

Back at 186th Street East, Dacca said the crew was looking at at least a week of work.

After building a small diversion dam upstream of the washed-out levee to keep the repair area as dry as possible, Dacca explained that a toe-hold 4 feet deep by 10 feet wide will be dug in the river channel next to what remains of the levee. It will be filled with large "six-man rocks" weighing 4,000 to 6,000 pounds each.

Some 2,000 cubic feet of dirt and smaller rocks will be dumped and compressed to reconstruct the levee.

There will continue to a lot of truck traffic around Orting, Dacca said.

The repairing of river levees is a constant job, Dacca said. Each flood season, the rivers flow back and forth down their channels and attack different spots on the levees.

What exactly causes various points on levees to tear away isn't completely understood, Fantello said, but said the receding floodwaters tend to cause the most damage. The falling water releases pressures on the levees and can scour the channel.

Last week's flood resulted in only a handful of severe washouts, he said.

"I think we fared pretty well," he said.