Seattle Public Utilities crews were poised in the Madison Valley neighborhood as a deadly rainstorm grew in intensity on the afternoon of Dec. 14.

But they weren't on East Madison Street. They weren't aware that water was flowing over the 9-inch curb there, forming a deadly waterfall.

Instead, the well-equipped crews were focusing on a nearby water retention pond that was overflowing.

In fact, no one at the utility would realize until far too late that among the more than 1,500 emergencies called in that night was the one that took Kate Fleming's life.

	Fleming

People who happened to be at East Madison that afternoon had called the utility's emergency line about the flooding, records show, though the records don't show the time of the calls or when the utility finally responded.

Utility officials said investigators may never be able to piece together the response times because harried field crews weren't able to enter times into the computer system.

This week, investigators discovered one badly clogged drain on East Madison Street, in a critical location.

Other drains on the street were found to be missing from the utility's digital map used by crews during emergencies. City officials don't know how they were left off.

Four SPU officials familiar with the situation, who talked to the Seattle P-I about the tragedy for the first time Thursday, said none of those problems explains the tragedy.

They said the most important factors were the volume of water and calls.

Similar trouble calls were coming in from all over the city at record rates that afternoon. There were more than 400 calls to the utility's emergency number in a single hour, flooding the lines at the same hour that the water was rising fast on East Madison, records show. Some callers couldn't reach a live person, utility officials said.

The calls coming from East Madison wouldn't have been as high a priority as calls from other locations, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that no one could predict the tragedy, said Carrie Parker, 44, the utility's emergency management coordinator who oversaw the emergency response during the storm.

Nick Pealy, 47, the utility's deputy director; Trish Rhay, 46, director of the wastewater division; and Debbie Maxfield, 42, the south drainage water operations manager, all said Fleming was terribly unlucky because of a cascade of circumstances. East Madison Street was in the bulls-eye of Seattle's heaviest rainstorm in years, according to citywide rain-gauge data released by the SPU to the P-I Thursday.

Between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., just before Fleming died, more than two-thirds of an inch fell in that area in just 30 minutes, an amount we can't expect again for 99 years, said David Hartley, a hydrologist with Northwest Hydraulic Consultants who analyzed the data for SPU. Other areas of the city had a third as much.

But Chris Burke, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle, said the concentration of rainfall in that area isn't enough to explain the tragedy. Intense rainfall was widespread, and others didn't die, said Burke, who on his own visited the Fleming site because he is curious about what happened.

"There was a foot and a half of standing water on Sandpoint Way," he said. "There was a mudslide off Queen Anne. A sinkhole in West Seattle.

"Something very unusual happened" in Fleming's neighborhood, he said.

Seattle Public Utilities officials, who sent crews to the site again today and are hiring a consultant to investigate the accident, say no one should be blamed because of the huge volume of rain and trouble calls.

"In a storm like this, flooding and ponding is occurring all over the city," said Nick Pealy, deputy director for field operations and maintenance at Seattle Public Utilities. "Assessing the severity of that on the phone ..."

"Is an art as much as a science," interjected spokesman Ryan.

"When you've got that many calls, it's a challenge," said Pealy.

Records released to the P-I on Thursday, along with the interviews, raised other questions.

There was a clogged drain in a critical location that hadn't been inspected for more than a year, since November 2005. The storm drains on another portion of East Madison Street, just to the west, are on a more frequent inspection schedule (at least once a year) because they are located where the road is considered a major arterial.

"We base cleaning on historical experience of crews, customer complaints, and, if we have a problem, we'll go out there," said Pealy.

Utility workers who found the deeply clogged drain this week at East Madison and 29th Avenue East don't know why it was in that condition.

"It could have been maintenance that wasn't done properly, or it could have been the storm itself, just putting material there," said Pealy.

Other drains in the same critical location on East Madison appeared to be working properly, he said, though business people who work on the street told the P-I there were three clogged drains. SPU officials said their investigation of the incident has just begun.

Other East Madison storm drains near Fleming's house weren't included on the city's computerized map of storm drains, which is used in the field by maintenance crews to locate them.

Utility officials say they were simply left off the map. They discovered the problem when the P-I inquired about them. They included drains cited as chronically dysfunctional by business people in the area, particularly garden-service manager Catie Corpron-Smith.

Drains throughout the city are placed on the digital map, using global positioning data, so crews can easily find them.

"Somehow they got missed," said Rhay.

As a result, she said, crews must hand-search for them in the water, rain and debris.

Corpron-Smith and other business people on East Madison actually painted blue lines next to the drains to help crews find them, though they weren't aware the drains had been left off the map.

None of the officials said the map problem contributed to Thursday's disaster.

The drains on East Madison are about 100 years old, and they lead to a mixture of clay and concrete pipes. Each drain leads to a pipe, about 6 inches in diameter, which drains into an underground catch basin that is roughly 4-foot wide and 6-foot deep, said Maxfield. The catch basins are designed to trap debris to be collected by cleanup crews. The outlets from the catch basins are about 8 inches to a foot in diameter, probably not enough to handle the volume of last week's flood, said the utility officials.

The East Madison drains and pipes, though 100 years old in some cases, aren't in terrible shape, said Rhay. Some clay pipes will last 200 to 300 years, said Pealy.

		Meryl Schenker / P-I
	Seattle Public Utilities' Randall Dickey, left, and Sherri Lam vacuum storm water out of a catch basin on East Madison Street Thursday.

The East Madison drain system isn't on the utility's upgrade list.

"We are in the process of doing a sweep of the area," said Maxfield. "We are cleaning as needed. Cleaning pipes. Cleaning catch basins out. Taking good documentation."

"This is not an area that has had a history that stands out in terms of maintenance problems or complaints," said Pealy.

Some neighborhoods with chronic flooding problems in the city have gotten upgrades in recent years, like Meadowbrook and nearby Madison Valley. Retention ponds and other facilities that will hold back storm water are the preferred alternative.

What will happen next at East Madison is unclear because it is too early to tell, officials said. The utility has a system for assessing upgrades that officials are very proud of, one that they adopted from Australia. It analyzes various factors, including trouble reports and assessments of need, before money is committed.

Madison Street is located 40 feet above Fleming's house, and almost next to it.

After the water spilled over the Madison Street curbs, it slammed into the basement where Fleming had gone to her sound room trying to rescue her recording equipment. It crashed in the foundation wall, trapping her.

The portion of East Madison Street that looms over Fleming's house is located at a low point where water collects after it flows downhill from big neighborhoods to the east and west.

Yet its drains aren't among the 8,856 that are mandated to be inspected at least once a year (out of a total of 44,000 citywide) because they lie within 75 feet of a major arterial, said Rhay. Flooding on arterials can cause car accidents, she said.

That's a factor on East Madison just a few blocks away -- west of 23rd Avenue East -- where the street is considered a major arterial. Business people in the area near Fleming's house said traffic there can be very heavy, too, with roads converging from downtown, the Washington Park Arboretum, the Madison Park area and Lake Washington Boulevard.

Other drain areas that get high-priority treatment by SPU are 313 "critical drainage sites," including one or two in Madison Valley, so designated because of complaints and a history of problems, explained Rhay.

The East Madison Street drains are among 2,102 drains on another priority list, a step down from the others, which are located within range of steep slopes.

They aren't required to be inspected annually, but some might get annual inspections or even more frequent examinations, depending on complaints, said Rhay.

As for priorities for responding to calls, the ones that must be tackled first are those where there is flooding or damage happening to private or public property, a life safety hazard or an environmental hazard, according to the utility's regulations.

Parker -- who worked for 24 hours the first day of the flood -- said it was a harrowing situation for the 70 utility workers in the field.

"Rivers running everywhere," she said.

The utility didn't find out what had happened to Fleming until one to two hours after the tragedy. And an hour after that, at 8:23 p.m., the utility took a call from Seattle Department of Transportation workers.

They warned the utility of flooding on East Madison, and suggested that a crew take care of it.

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