Southeast Alaska is known for rain, windstorms, mountainsides that loom above residential areas — and landslides that occur with increasing frequency.
Sitka knows the risk, and the pain, losing three people in a 2015 landslide.
Haines lost two people in a 2020 slide.
And now Wrangell is added to the list.
That list doesn’t include the multiple landslides over the years that caused damage and fear, but thankfully no deaths.
After the 2015 slide, the Sitka Sound Science Center took the lead and worked with the community — and federal money — to set up a landslide warning system. “We started when we had our landslide. We started calling scientists and asking: ‘What do we need to know about landslides,’” Lisa Busch, executive director at the science center, said.
Mudflows, even stuffed with fallen trees, fall too fast for motion sensors to provide adequate warning, so Sitka focused on placing rain gauges and soil-monitor sensors around town.
Data from those instruments is fed into a central unit, where a geoscientist can analyze the numbers and post the appropriate warning to the website sitkalandslide.org. From there, people can make their own decisions whether to stay in place or move to safer ground.
The Sitka website includes a historical perspective too. For example, the high-risk warning level includes the message: “Multiple landslides are very likely to occur in the Sitka area. There have been three storms in the last 20 years with similarly intense rainfall, and all three of them initiated multiple landslides.”
Expanding a similar system around Southeast of gauges, real-time analysis and terrain maps showing people the risk in specific areas will cost millions of dollars. But it would be money well spent for the safety of tens of thousands of people living in coastal communities from Metlakatla to Skagway.
The Sitka Sound Science Center received a federal grant to design and develop monitoring and warning systems in collaboration with tribal entities in six communities: Yakutat, Skagway, Hoonah, Klukwan, Kasaan and Craig. The next step should be to expand that effort, which will require state and federal help.
Wrangell’s Interim Borough Manager Mason Villarma was scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., this week to meet with the state’s congressional delegation and officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His meetings follow on discussions he had in Wrangell last week with Gov. Mike Dunleavy and other state officials.
Villarma said he respectfully asked: “My question to the governor and his commissioners was, ‘Does something have to happen before we do something?’”
It’s a good question, and one that the governor and other state officials, Alaska’s congressional delegation and federal agencies need to work on. A regionwide monitoring system to at least provide people with a warning of what could come down the mountainside would be a good answer.
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