Groups of volunteers are spending all day today putting the final touches on the floats that will appear in tomorrow's Daffodil Parade.

I went down to the Foss Waterway Seaport's Maritime Museum this afternoon to check out their progress. About four different floats were underway there about 1:30 p.m.

Below are some volunteers working on the City of Sumner's float.

Other groups of float-builders are setting up shop at the Active Construction, Inc., warehouse on River Road in Puyallup. Still more have their own storage areas.

In total, about 40 floats will appear in tomorrow's parade, along with about 80 other marching groups and dignitaries.

The parade starts at 10:15 in Tacoma, 12:45 in Puyallup, 2:30 in Sumner, and 5 p.m. in Orting.

Nearly 40 volunteers removed hundreds of pounds of garbage and belongings today from a vacant house in Federal Way.

Workers from Federal Way Police, South King Fire and Rescue and a dozen other groups cleaned up a blight in the Twin Lakes neighborhood.

The house was filled with old furniture, mattresses, paints, supplies and debris. Outside, it was surrounded with garbage.

The crews filled up two 30 cubic yard dumpsters. By 11:30 a.m., they finished cleaning up the outside and most of the inside.

In the morning, volunteer Carroll Fisher walked through the rooms with piles of debris.

“Junk galore,” Fisher said. “How could you make a mess so bad like this?”
The house at 2230 S.W. 330th Street is in foreclosure and couldn’t be sold because of all the garbage. It has been vacant for more than a year.

A woman, now in her 70s, purchased the home with her husband decades ago. After he died, she allowed her daughter and grandchildren to move in to help her. After the woman moved out into apartment, utilities were shut off due to nonpayment, police said. The house was left for over a year with hundreds of pounds of trash. The woman didn’t have the resources to clean up the house.

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