The hillside behind 1370 Alki Ave SW was a mess full of broken trees and branches. Seattle firefighters did some basic tree cutting but the rest of the cleanup is up to the building owner. The trees did some damage to the building breaking a sliding glass door.
The 1300 block of Alki Ave. SW has been a slide prone and water filled hillside for decades and on Sunday Jan 18 as the morning winds were howling at 1:20AM, it lived up to its reputation. Trees came down, split and filled up the area behind the apartments at 1370 Alki Ave. SW.
Building tentnat Suzanne Ulloa describe what happened, "it was about 1:20am, had been very windy, and rainy. I heard a big crack, then a sound of something heavy hitting the ground hard, and wasn't exactly sure what exactly happened.
After getting downstairs into the downstairs apartment of the older man downstairs, the glass sliding door in his living room was broken all over and had several feet of tree in it. And the whole patio area had tree limbs etc on it.
The firemen came and chain sawed the tree, and then put up a plastic type barrier for the doorway to keep out the cold.
It wasn't until daylight that could see that one very large tree had cracked off, and as it evidently in it's fast slide down the steep hillside, caused other trees to crack off too. Some went onto the other two neighbor's residences on either side of our apartment building."
Building owner Gerald Greenberg said "One of the tree branches found it's way through a glass door in the back, so there was a ton of tempered glass inside, The area is just inundated. I had a container of 500 or so corks from wine bottles over time that I had been collecting. It was in a contain on a table out back and that is spread all over now. The firemen got a big kick out picking it up."
