More than 200 people on one plane and a load of shovels on another flight were airlifted into Juneau to help remove more than 3 million pounds of snow from municipal facilities and schools following record storms, City Manager Katie Koester told the Juneau Assembly at its meeting Jan. 12.
“It turns out we don’t have that many snow shovels in Juneau, especially during a snowpocalypse,” she said.
Koester also said new equipment to monitor avalanches on Mount Juneau has been installed to help warn the community below.
Koester said more than 200 people to shovel snow and perform engineering assessments on roofs were brought in by the city’s insurance company. All told, including city and other workers, “over 237 people shoveled 3 million pounds of snow from city facilities,” she said.
“We did hire multiple contractors to help us get rid of snow,” she said.
“As you all have experienced, because you live in Juneau, there are not a lot of places to put the snow. And so this becomes a very labor-intensive exercise in taking snow blowers or loaders and filling up duck trucks and dumping that snow,” she told the assembly.
“We do have a snow dump at Thane and a snow dump in the (Mendenhall) Valley. We did receive permission from DEC (Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation) to dump that snow into the channel under specific conditions — making sure it’s clean snow, it’s not contaminated — just because of the sheer volume of that snow. So we thank the state for that.”
Also brought in recently was an avalanche monitoring system which has been installed at the Alaska Electric Light & Power substation on Douglas Island, Koester said.
“That will tell us the moment that we have an avalanche, even a very small one,” she said. “And so that piece of equipment is going to be really critical in helping us understand when it’s safe.”
Severin Staehly, who works for an avalanche technology start-up called Gravimon in Switzerland, installed the Doppler radar system at the power substation on Jan. 11, according to reporting by radio station KTOO.
The system, called Avymonster, points at Mount Juneau to continuously scan for avalanches. “We can really see where it happens and where it starts, where it ends, measure the speed and give all this information to the forecasters,” Staehly told KTOO.
Staehly told the radio station that the setup is used in other places with high avalanche risk like Norway, Canada and the Alps. He said he installed one in Alaska earlier this month near Portage Lake, south of Anchorage.
