Edgewick Railroad Fill Failure, Washington State, 1932

On February 26, 1932, a torrent of water, mud, and debris swept through the small settlement of Edgewick in central King County, Washington, killing seven people and injuring two others. The flash flood was the result of two days of widespread heavy rain and snow melt that blew out a 175-foot high earthfill railroad embankment over Boetzke Creek on Mount Washington. While not strictly a dam failure, the fact that the culvert under the fill plugged and backed up floodwater until it failed, makes this disaster essentially a dam-like failure. As such, it remains the only dam failure in Washington State to result in loss of life.
The town of Edgewick was located in central King County about 5 miles southeast of North Bend, at the confluence of Boxley Creek and the South Fork Snoqualmie River
(Figure 1). Edgewick, originally a lumber company mill town, had seen its share of disasters. The village was destroyed by the “Boxly Blowout” flood of 1918, when excessive seepage through the glacial moraine forming the north abutment of the City of Seattle’s Masonry Dam initiated an enormous landslide and debris flow at the face of the moraine. The village was never rebuilt as a mill town, but at the time of the 1930 US Census, 25 people were living there in 12 dwellings.