String of fatal landslides forces Southeast Alaska to reckon with risk

Ketchikan gets more rain than almost anywhere else in Alaska. It’s the kind of rain you have to dump out of your coat pockets before you come inside. Mountainsides across the channel on Gravina Island are streaked with scars from landslides in years past.

But even so, landslides never felt like a threat, said Ketchikan mayor and local historian Dave Kiffer.

“If you ask most people here, they’re going to say, ‘Well, if it was going to happen, it would have happened by now,’” Kiffer said in a recent phone interview. “That’s where the shock comes — all of a sudden, boom, this happens, and it really feels like it comes out of the blue.”

The Third Avenue landslide that rocked Ketchikan in August was unprecedented in the community. 

There had been some scattered rockslides and smaller landslides, often in areas where humans had disturbed the ground in some way. One took out a beloved downtown grocery store. Others temporarily closed roads on the outskirts of town.

But never before had a 250-foot wide section of hillside just up and given way. It crashed downhill nearly a quarter-mile in just 15 short seconds, the city and borough said. The slide killed a city maintenance technician who had come in on his day off to clear storm drains, and another man has a long road back after sustaining serious injuries, Kiffer said.

It simply had not happened in the 130-odd years since people started living on the banks of Ketchikan Creek year-round, and certainly not right in the city center. So, Kiffer said, this was a change.

“Now the biggest mindset change going forward is, yeah, they can happen here,” Kiffer said. “So how do we mitigate that?”

That’s a big question, and not one with easy answers. 

Four fatal landslides have struck communities across Southeast Alaska since 2015, killing at least a dozen people. Landslides are nothing new in this region of steep mountainsides and heavy rain. But the idea that every few years, another Southeast Alaska community has to dig its way out after a fatal disaster — that is new. The string of recent deadly slides is changing the way people look at their surroundings and plan for the future as they reckon with their own risk in a changing climate. 

Communities across the region are working to mitigate the risk, but their options are limited. Forecasting landslides is difficult. Home insurance doesn’t cover landslide damage. And some efforts to address landslide risk on a community-wide basis have run into pushback from residents.

It’s a question on the mind of another Southeast Alaska mayor, too — Tom Morphet, in Haines. In 2020, after an atmospheric river dumped heavy rain for days on top of a thick layer of snow, a landslide on Beach Road killed two people. Looking at photos of the Ketchikan slide, he said, is unsettling.

“There really was nothing in the area of the slide that you can say, ‘Oh, we cut too many trees there, or we cleared too much,’” Morphet said. “That’s, I guess, maybe the spookiest part of it of all — that a bunch of 300-year old trees and vegetation can just move on you and just collapse.”

Morphet said living with that risk, knowing the hillside could one day simply collapse, makes it hard for communities to plan for the future.

“It’s a whole new regimen of things we have to figure out because of these weather extremes,” he said.

It’s an issue that Sitka reckoned within 2015 after a series of slides, including one in town that killed three people. That led the then-director of the Sitka Sound Science Center, Lisa Busch, to convene a team of researchers to address the problem, said Ron Heintz, the center’s senior researcher. 

“For a lot of people in the community, it really sort of made them aware, much more aware of the fact that these things can occur, and they can occur right in town,” he said.

Heintz said it’s hard to say whether landslides are becoming more frequent in Southeast Alaska. It’s an active area of research. But Heintz said 90-plus percent of them are associated with so-called atmospheric rivers, which bring most tropical air northward to the region.

“We’re getting more atmospheric rivers, and as the climate warms, the atmospheric rivers seem to be getting more intense,” he said.

So how can communities respond? For one thing, Heintz said, it’s important to create maps of what areas are the most risky. Those can help guide policymakers as they consider new areas for home and business development. But Heintz said that knowledge is both a blessing and a curse for homeowners. 

“They’re sort of reluctant to know,” he said. “They don’t really want the municipality to know, or the insurance companies to know, because they’re afraid of what it would do to their property values or their insurance rates.”

And efforts to translate those risk maps into policy have indeed been controversial. City leaders in Sitka ultimately rolled back restrictions on development imposed after the 2015 slide. In Juneau, the assembly declined to adopt new landslide hazard maps and scrapped development restrictions last year after hearing pushback from homeowners who would have been placed in high-risk areas. And land is already at a premium in communities across the region struggling with housing shortages.

Regardless, Heintz said, it’s difficult or impossible to get insurance covering landslides in Alaska. Researchers with the RAND Corporation, a policy think tank working closely with the Sitka Sound Science Center, found that landslide insurance would likely require some sort of government intervention, maybe something akin to the existing National Flood Insurance Program.

“If you live in a flood zone, the federal government requires [people with government-backed mortgages] to have flood insurance, and you pay into a pool for flood insurance,” Heintz said. “That would be the way landslide insurance would have to work .”

But that brings with it many of the same complications that have made hazard maps difficult for communities to act on.

One effort that’s less controversial is a warning system that lets people know when conditions are ripe for a landslide. The Sitka Sound Science Center developed a website that provides a 72-hour outlook for landslide risk based on recent rainfall data, and Heintz said researchers are working on integrating more data on things like soil moisture and pore pressure into the model in the future. 

Kiffer, the Ketchikan mayor, said better weather data closer to town could help people in Ketchikan better prepare for landslides and look out for warning signs like dirty runoff and saturated soil. 

Right now, Ketchikan’s primary source of weather data is a station at the airport, near sea level and across the channel from town. That station reported far less rainfall on the day of the August slide than city-run stations at higher elevations — 2.5 inches at the airport versus more than 10 inches measured at a city-run weather station at a higher-elevation hydropower station.

“They should have been publicly saying, ‘Ketchikan’s getting six or seven inches of rain downtown. That’s a big storm,’” Kiffer said.

Kiffer said he’d also like to see the federal flood insurance program extended to people who live with the risk of landslides.

For now, Kiffer said, Ketchikan is reckoning with what looks like it might be the new normal. 

For some families, he said, life will never be the same. But even for those not in the path of the slide, Kiffer said, Ketchikan’s landslide risk will remain high on residents’ minds.

“Every time I drive on the Third Avenue Bypass, probably for the foreseeable future, I’ll be thinking about … the hillside that came down,” he said. “Could it come down again? It suddenly adds a bit of uncertainty into our lives that wasn’t there before.”