Weston Holland went to bed in his apartment on Emily Drive on Monday evening, but in the early morning hours on Tuesday he woke to water on the floor. So he went to investigate.
“In the process of doing that, the front door had this look of water coming through the side — like the Titanic,” he said. “And then the bottom of the frame of the door broke in and a wall of water came.”
Water from the swollen Mendenhall River rushed into the basement apartment. The force of it pushed Holland back and floated kitchen appliances like the stove and the fridge.
“It went from just a couple inches on the floor to about my navel in, I would say, about a minute and a half. It was just coming in quick,” he said. “And with that much time, the only thing you can think about is getting everybody out.”
Holland turned to wake up his wife and their four sons so that they could evacuate.
“The youngest one was petrified,” Brittany Holland said.
“He fought us,” Weston Holland said.
Their son is just 7 years old and autistic, so he didn’t understand what was happening. They didn’t either. The Hollands knew that glacial outburst flooding was underway in the Mendenhall Valley, but during last year’s catastrophic flood, their home didn’t even take on enough water to activate the sump-pumps.
This year was different. They got their youngest out the door by floating him out on top of the refrigerator. Brittany Holland was momentarily trapped on their porch by the rushing water, but she was able to climb up on top of a wall in the front yard, where a friend was able to pull her to safety.
The Hollands left some ducks, a cat, a lizard and a beloved pet dog behind. They arrived at the city’s emergency shelter at Floyd Dryden Middle School, soaked with ice cold glacial water, around the time when flood waters were cresting just after 3 a.m. on Tuesday.
Glacial outburst floods happen every year in Juneau, but the last two years have been unprecedented. Last year’s catastrophic flood pushed the Mendenhall River to nearly 15 feet. This year, the river rose even higher, setting a new record of 15.99 feet.
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the water pushed much further into the Mendenhall Valley this time, but the city is still trying to figure out how many houses were impacted.
“I think many homes experience some level of flooding, some significant I think somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred, maybe hundreds,” Barr said on Tuesday morning. “We just don’t really have a good handle on that yet.”
Though he says the type of damage is different from last year’s flood. Many riverside properties were damaged by severe erosion last year, which undermined foundations and destroyed two houses entirely.
“We saw much less erosion this year,” Barr said. “I don’t have complete reports yet, but the significance of the impact of this year is related to standing water.”
The city issued an evacuation notice on Monday evening, but not everyone left their house in time. Last year, her house barely saw any flooding, so Debbie Penrose Fischer stayed put as the Mendenhall River rose on Monday, even as Alaska Electric Light and Power cut power to her neighborhood.
“Last year we saw the water, but it wasn’t anywhere near,” she said.
By the time she realized that this year’s flood might be different, it was too late.
“We were completely surrounded,” Penrose Fischer said. “And it wasn’t just still water, it was kind of like a pretty heavy flow. And let me tell you something, that water was ice cold.”
Bound to her wheelchair, she wasn’t sure how to escape. She relies on a supply of oxygen, and she watched as the batteries on her tank started running low. Just past 7 a.m., she made a call to Capital City Fire/Rescue.
“I was trapped, I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
A rescue team was able to pick her up in the raft and take her to the shelter, where she joined more than 40 other evacuees.
Juneau Mayor Beth Weldon visited the shelter just before noon.
“Instead of a few inches in people’s houses, they had feet in people’s houses,” Weldon said. “So taking lots of pictures to hopefully help with a National Declaration of Disaster.”
In a special Assembly meeting on Monday, the City and Borough of Juneau passed a resolution to declare the flood a local emergency and put in requests for state and federal aid.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy followed suit by declaring a state disaster emergency on Monday afternoon. Those declarations will free up recovery money at the state level and potentially draw attention from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In a statement, Sen. Dan Sullivan said he’s been in touch with FEMA’s top administrator. Weldon said she’s spoken to Sen. Lisa Murkowski too.
“We’re already talking about what can we do to prevent this,” Weldon said. “Because it was a foot higher than last year’s, ironically on the same date.”
But she says it will take federal help to get there.
KTOO’s Clarise Larson contributed to this report.
