TUKWILA, Wash. (AP) — Crews used sandbags to shore up an earthen levee south of Seattle on Monday after a small section of it failed following a week of heavy rains, prompting an evacuation order covering parts of three suburbs, officials said.
The evacuation order from King County in Washington state was sent to about 1,100 homes and businesses east of the Green River in parts of Kent, Renton and Tukwila, said Brendan McCluskey, the county's emergency management director. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning that initially covered nearly 47,000 people, but was reduced within a few hours to an area covering 7,000 people.
No one was injured, McCluskey said.
Authorities in Renton and Tukwila said Monday afternoon that the flooding was confined to small, industrial areas and that no residents were being evacuated.
The levee breach followed days of heavy rain and flooding that inundated communities, forced the evacuations of tens of thousands of people and prompted scores of rescues throughout western Washington state.
The failure occurred on the Desimone levee beside the Green River, in an area where officials had been concerned about a possible breach, John Taylor, director of the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, said at a news conference Monday.
With high water levels in the past week, workers began installing a “seepage blanket” — a permeable material that can remove water from a cut slope — in an effort to reduce the flood risk, and crews were present Monday when the breach occurred.
“We were there because we are monitoring these levees closely,” Taylor said. “It’s just not typical to have these levees have this much water behind them for this long. They’re getting saturated and they’re starting to show the effects of that.”
The spokesperson for the city of Renton, Laura Pettitt, said the breach was minimal and was being filled with sandbags, including large ones about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and holding about a ton of sand.
“What we understand is that the area is being managed and the breach has been controlled,” she said. “However, that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be future impact with any changing situation.”
A section of paved bike path along the top of the levee in Tukwila cratered and broke where the levee washed away beneath it.
Reid Wolcott, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the flash flood warning was initially issued for a “rather large area because we didn't know specifically which areas would flood."
“We have since refined the initial alerting area to a much smaller area, and we will continue to refine that alert as we learn more information on the potential impacts,” he said.
The levee was badly damaged during flooding in 2020. Long-term repairs were not expected to be completed until 2031, according to a blog post from the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks.
In August 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began repairs to a 775-foot-long (235-meter) segment of the levee, as the result of flooding in March 2014, according to the federal agency. The damage significantly impacted the levee’s ability to protect an area of about 7.5 square miles (19 square kilometers). The repairs were to be completed by the end of 2015, though it wasn't immediately clear when work concluded.
This story has been corrected to show that the three cities affected were Tukwila, Kent and Renton, rather than Tukwila, Kent and Auburn.
Rush reported from Portland, Oregon. Associated Press writer Christopher L. Keller contributed from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Crews inspect a crack in a levee along the Green River in Tukwila, Wash., Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Valdes)
Crews inspect a crack in a levee along the Green River in Tukwila, Wash., Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Valdes)
Crews inspect a crack in a levee along the Green River in Tukwila, Wash., Monday, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Valdes)
CAIRO (AP) — Iranians began to regain internet access on Wednesday after authorities ended a monthslong shutdown. But users said service was slow and spotty in some areas, with apps like YouTube and Instagram heavily restricted, as they were before the cutoff began during nationwide protests in January.
Authorities justified the outage as a military imperative after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Their decision to lift some restrictions this week came as negotiators appeared to be closing in on a more permanent truce. But many Iranians feared access could be cut off again at a moment's notice.
Internet tracking company Netblocks said Iran’s connectivity, which measures the ability of devices to connect to the internet, is at around 86% of capacity from before the cutoff. Internet analysis firm Kentik said internet traffic, which measures the amount of data transferred and is a good illustration of usage, was at around 40%.
Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity analyst, said there were still widespread disruptions. “It's too early to say the shutdown is over,” he wrote on X.
Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. Young people with online careers saw their incomes evaporate. Job losses and the closure of online businesses added to the war's steep economic costs.
The cutoff made it difficult for Iranian families to communicate through months of unrest and war. At some points, phone lines were also cut off, though they were later restored.
A woman living in Tehran said that for months she was barely able to speak to her sons living abroad. She couldn't believe authorities had restored access, saying she had assumed they would find some justification to prolong the outage.
A taxi driver said service was restored but weak. He expressed hope it would improve so he could use messaging apps with family and friends. Both spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Prices spiked during the shutdown, with residents in Tehran at times paying around $7.50 per gigabyte. Prices are back down to around $2.25 for 30 gigabytes, roughly where they were before the protests.
Even then, Iran tightly controlled access to popular social media sites, leading many to rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs. The cost of those workarounds soared during the shutdown, making them unaffordable for many as the economy was battered.
Businesses have started reappearing online, announcing their return with posts on sites like Instagram and Telegram.
A gamer and tech influencer in the central city of Isfahan said the shutdown had caused him to lose a lot of his audience on YouTube and Instagram, where he had spent years building up a large following.
“All my views and interactions are way down. I’ve been erased from the algorithm,” he said in a voice note sent by WhatsApp, adding that his internet connection was still slower than before the shutdown.
“The situation is such that many content producers have had their income reduced to zero, have moved on to other jobs, or have been forced to sell their equipment to survive,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests that were eventually stamped out in a violent crackdown. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands detained.
That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout after the start of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other top officials.
The government faced criticism for the prolonged shutdown, which caused even more harm to an economy devastated by inflation, strikes on key industries and a U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.
The internet cutoff cost an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper last month. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi.
Iranians still had access to a national net, but that has a far narrower reach, and users complained of poor service and heavy censorship. Senior government officials are given SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure, the government expanded access to the SIM cards to some professions during the shutdown.
A woman checks her smartphone while sitting on a bench along a sidewalk in northern Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, May 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
