Jules Hughes leaned her bike against a vehicle at a construction site in the heart of downtown Carnation, Washington. “Eventually, there’ll be seating here,” she said, describing plans to create a more welcoming downtown for the city. Carnation, about 30 miles east of Seattle, is home to around 2,500 people and growing. People chattered in nearby beer gardens as Hughes, a local arts advocate, settled onto a rock with her lunch in the September sun and pointed out the recent changes. A construction site across the street separated the Senior Center from its brand-new low-income apartments, and new million-dollar housing was going up near the Tolt River, a half-mile to the south.
But that could all change. Sixteen miles upstream of Carnation sits the Tolt River Dam, built by the city of Seattle in the early 1960s to serve its growing water needs. Today, the dam provides one-third of the water used by Seattle Public Utilities’ 1.6 million customers, and recent inspections coordinated by federal and city authorities showed that the dam was still safe and unlikely to fail. If it did, however, it would be a disaster: It could unleash enough water to drown Carnation in 30 feet of water within just 90 minutes.
Carnation residents have regarded the 200-foot earthen dam with skepticism since its inception. Almost immediately after its construction, the city attorney began pushing for an alarm system to be installed. In the 1970s, King County agreed to install an alarm system to give locals time to evacuate if the dam failed, and the county complied, eventually transferring responsibility to Seattle. For decades, loudspeaker tests every Wednesday at noon created an annoying but reliable rhythm to local life.
Then, on July 28, 2020 — a Tuesday — the alarm sounded for 38 minutes. Hughes was on her porch. “It was distinctively saying, ‘The Tolt Dam has failed,’ which was chilling,” she said. She threw photo albums and her late partner’s Super-8 tapes into a chest, thinking about how the avalanche of water would soon submerge the town. “It was like, I might be running for my life right now.”
Today, the dam provides one-third of the water used by Seattle Public Utilities’ 1.6 million customers.
That turned out to be a false alarm, and the city of Seattle apologized for the “confusion and fear.” But problems with the system persisted, with the tests failing to go off at all on a number of Wednesdays. After a second false alarm in August 2023, the city council declared a “state of emergency” to draw attention to “its concerns and doubts about the City of Seattle’s ability to operate the Tolt Dam.” Then, in March 2024, a contractor working out-of-state accidentally programmed a test alarm to go off at noon Central Time instead of Pacific Time. On the heels of so many malfunctions, Carnation’s city council threatened to sue Seattle.
Emergency communications experts and residents acknowledge that all the incidents may have severed something tough to quantify — something that is hard to win in the first place, but harder still to recover: community trust.
SINCE THE MOST recent false alarm in March 2024, the alarm system has been turned off at the request of the Carnation City Council. In the meantime, multiple recent inspections have shown no issues with dam safety: Federal representatives’ June 2024 inspection did not identify any deficiencies. A representative of Seattle Public Utilities, which operates the dam, said that the city’s inspection in 2023 did not find any major deficiencies, adding that Tolt Dam was built to withstand a one-in-a-million storm.
But no dam is built to last forever; according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most earthen dams have an expected lifespan of around 50 years. Tolt Dam is 62 this year. And climate change is generating more intense storms with heavier rainfall — storms that the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded threaten dams. “As much of the U.S. water infrastructure nears the end of its planned life, climate change impacts, such as more extreme weather events, will further strain its ability to operate well,” the agency wrote in a primer on climate change impacts.
Now that the alarms have been disabled, Carnation would have to rely on other systems, such as text alerts, if the dam fails. “We don’t like it, but risking false alarms again is just as bad,” said Mayor Jim Ribail.
In a real emergency, warning systems are a matter of life or death, said Jeannette Sutton, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany who studies emergency communications. Residents won’t get environmental cues to evacuate during dam disasters until it’s too late.
“Every dam that is near a population center (or upstream of a population center) needs to have some system to alert people. Flash flooding can be devastating. We can’t leave it to chance that a dam won’t fail,” Sutton said in an email. Even as more people have moved into once-rural areas over the past two decades, the number of U.S. dams classified as “high hazard” — dams that would put lives at risk if they failed — has doubled. In Washington, the state Department of Ecology has identified 74 dams, including Tolt, that would put more than 300 people at risk if they were to fail.
Yet no other Seattle-owned dams have a siren system like Tolt’s, a Seattle Public Utilities representative said. When asked about how many dams across the state have alarm systems, Samantha Long from the Washington State Department of Ecology said no data was readily available; to assess that information, the state would have to review emergency action plans from all 522 of its high-hazard dams. And with over 91,000 dams in the U.S. owned by a patchwork of local, state, federal authorities and private entities, it’s unclear how many dams are connected to audio alarm systems, let alone how many have experienced alarm malfunctions. “There probably is no national data regarding this,” said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.
EVEN IF CARNATION’S alarms were still active, said resident Ceola Rystad, “after a while, you just don’t pay attention.”
Residents may be experiencing what some call the “cry wolf effect,” where too many false alarms lead to distrust, Sutton said. Additionally, people report experiencing emotional fatigue around the threat. Carnation resident Jenn Dean said she reviewed her emergency escape plans every night before falling asleep. “I’ll get in this loop where I’m suffering from anxiety,” she said.
Collienne Becker, another local, said it’s triggering to hear the test alarm and avoided town on Wednesdays at noon before the tests were disabled. This past April, representatives from Seattle and Carnation took Becker and other residents to the dam to show them it’s safe. But Becker is still scared, and considering leaving the area. “I just don’t trust Seattle Public Utilities that (the alarm system) is fixed. … It’s a fear, but it’s also a trust issue.”
“It does not matter to a lot of people that (dam failure) is a low risk. It still has the potential for a large failure,” Mayor Ribail said. An engineer for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates Tolt Dam and will soon consider Seattle’s application for recertification by 2029, sent a letter to Seattle’s chief dam safety engineer in March, saying Carnation’s situation was “unacceptable.” “The combination of the alarm testing frequency and series of false alarm events has clearly become detrimental instead of beneficial to public safety,” he wrote.
“Every dam that is near a population center needs to have some system to alert people. We can’t leave it to chance that a dam won’t fail.”
REPRESENTATIVES FROM Seattle and Carnation’s mayoral offices have met regularly since the July 2020 false alarm to hash out a plan, but progress has been slow. “This would not be dragging out this long if it was in the city of Seattle,” Ribail said.
In a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regarding dam relicensing, the city of Carnation requested 24/7 onsite oversight of the dam and asked the federal government to develop an alarm system inspection program. Research suggests that leaders might reverse the cry wolf effect by rebuilding trust in the dam and the agencies managing it.
But that won’t be easy. For many Carnation residents, the dam itself is the problem.
In the event of a real dam failure, even a perfect alarm system wouldn’t change the difficulty of evacuating an entire town in 90 minutes. Between residents, tourists, about 1,000 schoolchildren and nearby farms, more than 4,000 people could try to leave simultaneously.
Dean’s friends have talked “constantly” about the stress of living near natural and man-made hazards, she said. One of her friends just bought a cliffside property that might offer more safety in the event of a dam breach. Dean, however, is considering moving. “I don’t want to leave,” she said, “but I am completely uncomfortable with it.”
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This article appeared in the November 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The dam that cried wolf.”
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