Fearing damage to key bridges serving the city and the Boeing plant, Mayor Denis Law has asked that King County remove all chains it has used to anchor logs used for levee projects on the Cedar River.

It was logs chained together that allowed a logjam to form on the Riverview Park pedestrian bridge in January.  A similar but potentially more dangerous logjam formed behind the Williams Avenue Bridge in 2009.

In the Feb. 28 letter Law also asked for reimbursement from the county for the roughly $10,500 cost of removing the logjam from the Riverview Park bridge.

Gregg Zimmerman, the city’s public works administration, said this week that a key county official said the county would reimburse the city for the those costs.

Law also wrote he wants the county to revisit a policy of removing “rock armoring” from the river that allows the river to undermine banks and cause trees to fall into the river.

The official, Mark Isaacson, the county’s natural resources director,  has indicated the county  will set up a task force that would include Renton to investigate ways to better protect the city from these migrating logs.

Zimmerman said he was “encouraged” after his conversation with Isaacson. “The county was taking the situation very seriously,” he said.