The Sewer Pipe Under Lowman Beach Park Has Been Under Repair Since 2022. It's Still Not Done.

Chain-link fencing has come and gone at Lowman Beach Park often enough over the past four years that it barely registers as news anymore. What's easy to miss is that the fencing keeps returning for the same reason: a single force main under Beach Drive SW that first failed in March 2022 and is only now, in the back half of 2026, getting the rest of its repair.

King County Wastewater Treatment District calls it the Murray Force Main Rehabilitation project. It's the second phase of a job that started before most people currently walking past the park noticed the first one.

Two repairs, one pipe

The Murray Pump Station moves sewage from the Lowman Beach area to the West Point Treatment Plant through two pressurized pipes running under Beach Drive SW. In March 2022, corrosion broke one of them. King County repaired about 800 feet of the damaged section at the time and, based on public reporting, moved on.

That left 350 feet unaddressed. This year's project is that remaining stretch, plus two new air valves meant to slow the corrosion that caused the break in the first place. Work started staging in spring 2026 and crews have been on site since, working the dry-season window, since pressurized sewer lines can only be safely opened when wastewater flows are lower. By mid-August, King County reported that pipe liners were finished near the northeast corner of the park and along Beach Drive SW, with valve installation and street-panel restoration beginning around August 17.

Road and park restoration is supposed to follow this fall, according to the county's own project page. Nobody watching this stretch of Beach Drive SW should treat that as a hard date.

What "substantially complete" meant last time

Lowman Beach Park has been here before, and not with this same pipe. In 2021, Seattle Parks and Recreation hired McClung Construction for a $1.2 million project to remove the park's failing concrete seawall and its tennis court, restore a more natural shoreline, and daylight a portion of Pelly Creek that had been buried under pavement. That work ran through the fall and winter, overlapping directly with the force main's first break in March 2022.

By June 2022, Parks spokesperson Karen O'Connor told West Seattle Blog the project was "substantially complete." The park stayed partially fenced anyway. The explanation at the time was a cold spring that slowed how quickly the new lawn could establish, and the closure dragged on for months past what neighbors expected once they heard the word "complete."

That's the pattern worth knowing before assuming fall 2026 means the fencing disappears the day the county finishes its valve work. Two different agencies, two different projects, but the same park has already shown once that official milestones and public reopenings don't move on the same clock.

A rough timeline of how this pipe's repair has actually unfolded:

• March 2022 — One of the Murray Pump Station's two force mains fails from corrosion.
• 2022 — King County repairs roughly 800 feet of the damaged pipe. The remaining 350 feet is left for later.
• Spring 2026 — Crews begin staging for phase two: lining the remaining pipe and replacing pump-station valves.
• June 2026 — A second, related project starts: sewer-pipe repairs continuing about a quarter mile north on Beach Drive SW.
• August 2026 — Pipe liners finished; valve installation and street-panel restoration begin.
• Fall 2026 — Road and park restoration promised, per the county's project page, still pending as of late September.

Up the road, a different kind of repair

Walk north from Lowman Beach Park along Beach Drive SW and you'll pass Emma Schmitz Memorial Overlook, where a different kind of maintenance cycle just played out.

The long retaining wall at the north end of the overlook had been tagged and repainted so many times that one regular walker described it as happening "dozens and dozens of times over the years." Neighbor David Stockert got tired of it and crowdfunded a fix: a 189-foot community mural with a Puget Sound theme, designed by local artist Nalisha Estrellas. Volunteers signed up in two-hour shifts to paint it on May 24, 2025, after a weather delay pushed the date back a week, and Lafayette Elementary third-graders had come a few days earlier to paint the sea stars.

For more than a year, it worked. Then in early August 2026, a tagger hit the mural's longest stretch with a single outlined tag in white paint. West Seattle Blog reached out to Estrellas, who confirmed she'd heard about it from Stockert directly and began discussing a repair plan.

Neither the sewer pipe nor the mural is a project with a single finish line. The pipe is being repaired in the segments the county's schedule allows. The mural is being maintained against a tagging problem that predates it by years and will likely outlast this repaint too.

The walk that ties them together

Lowman Beach Park sits at 7017 Beach Drive SW, with about 300 feet of rocky shoreline, an open lawn, and a flat path connecting south to Lincoln Park along the water. Emma Schmitz Memorial Overlook sits at 4503 Beach Drive SW, a little over a mile north, with a paved shoreline path popular for jogging and an unobstructed view across to the Olympics.

Walking the stretch between them right now means passing an active King County work zone with alternating one-lane traffic and steel road plates, then arriving at a mural that's currently showing a fresh coat over a summer tag. Both sites remain open to the public even with work underway. Neither looks finished, because neither is.

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