If you drive north on Lutak Road in Haines, you’ll see snow-covered peaks towering over the ocean below. If you look closer, you might notice something else: vertical gashes running down the mountain face. They mark places where landslides – or maybe avalanches – have struck, taking trees, soil and rocks down with them.
Patty Brown chairs the Haines Planning Commision. She pointed to one of the slide paths while out for a drive on a cold, clear day back in January.
“There’s probably been a history of different slides reshaping what that whole face even looks like,” Brown said. “All this is slide, slide, slide.”
A new report aims to address that reality by mapping the local landscape and pinpointing areas that might be more prone to slides down the line. The goal: providing homeowners and the local government with a science-backed tool that can be used to gauge landslide susceptibility, and to plan accordingly.
The multi-year effort, which was paid for with federal funding, began after an atmospheric river dumped record levels of rain on Haines in 2020. The storm washed out roads and triggered landslides, including one that killed two beloved community members.
“It was associated with such a radical weather event,” Brown said. “Those are going to keep getting more dramatic and be beyond what we predicted. So we better have some kind of an inventory of what to expect.”
The 2020 event and resulting maps are part of a bigger story about intensifying natural disasters – and how communities across Alaska and the U.S. are responding. As climate change and development fuel more destructive disasters including floods, slides and wildfires, local governments are trying to get ahead of the problem without also threatening homes and livelihoods.
Mapping efforts – and pushback – across Southeast
The Haines report is composed of three different maps, which were published in January by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. The maps were made using light detection and ranging technology, also known as lidar, which researchers attach to planes, drones or helicopters to fly over a study area. The lidar sends down light pulses that bounce off the trees, buildings and the ground. The time it takes for the pulses to return provides detailed data about the landscape and what’s on it.
“So you can think of it kind of like a flashlight that’s shining down. Where does that light hit? Where does it pass through?” said report co-author Jillian Nicolazzo, a geologist with the Landslide Hazards program at the Department of Natural Resources.
The data is then used to create the maps, which local governments, communities and homeowners can reference when making crucial decisions about where to build housing, roads, schools and more.
“If we’ve identified an area that might be susceptible to landsliding, and in 15 years someone wants to put a subdivision in that area, well, hopefully they’ll see that we’ve identified it as a higher hazard area, and they’ll take a closer look,” Nicolazzo said.
Haines is not the only community interested in mapping the risk. Similar projects have been completed or are underway in more than half a dozen other communities in Southeast, in part due to four fatal landslides in the last decade. Those disasters happened in Sitka, Ketchikan, Haines and Wrangell.
But the efforts aren’t without controversy. Efforts to map physical hazards have sparked opposition in Alaska, but also in other places, like New Orleans and Oregon. The pushback has typically come from homeowners who don’t want the state or local government to label their properties as high risk out of fear it will drive down their property values and make it more difficult to get insurance.
Ron Heintz is a senior researcher at the Sitka Sound Science Center, a nonprofit that’s played a key role in confronting landslide risk in Southeast. He said the issue routinely comes up during conversations about landslide risk in Alaska.
“Everybody wants to see a hazard map, and they want to see if they’re exposed to any sort of hazard. But they don’t want any sort of official acceptance or understanding of these hazard maps,” Heintz said.
Take Juneau. In 2020, the local assembly commissioned new hazard maps, which placed some neighborhoods in landslide zones for the first time. The move drew widespread concerns that the maps would drive down property values or impact insurance. Later, in 2023, the assembly decided against formally adopting the maps and eliminated landslide restrictions from the city’s land use code.
Todd Winkel is a Haines resident who owns property right next to the fatal 2020 slide. He said people in Sitka warned Haines residents to push back against potential risk mapping after the disaster.
That was partially due to worries over real estate. But Winkel said it was also because people felt the mapping would only be beneficial if the local government focused on helping landowners mitigate the risk. Winkel agrees. He said Haines should focus instead on reducing the threat in areas that are clearly landslide-prone.
“If you’re not going to do anything, don’t risk assess it,” Winkel said.
Risks can hide in plain sight
The Haines Planning Commission, for its part, hopes the maps will help the community better gauge and respond to the risk, both during future extreme weather events and when making long-term planning decisions.
That could include encouraging people to consult an engineer before developing somewhere that’s landslide prone, said Derek Poinsette, the planning commission’s vice chair.
Poinsette emphasized that the commission does not currently plan to use the maps for regulatory purposes, such as vetting building permits – and that the maps have a few important limitations.
Key among them is that they do not predict where slides will happen in the future. Instead, they identify areas that may be more susceptible to slides due to the slope angle, vegetation and more. Another caveat, he said, is that the maps rely heavily on lidar, which provides important information but is not the same as verifying the risk in the field.
“This isn’t the last word on any specific area,” Poinsette said. “Getting out there on the ground and actually taking soil samples and drilling cores and things like that is what ultimately needs to happen to do a final engineering type assessment for any location.”
Back in the car, Brown, the commission chair, said there is a long history of landslides in Haines, and that the community is highly attuned to that reality. Still, she said, the deadly landslide in 2020 made at least one thing clear: the risk can hide in plain sight.
“It was a forested slope, and we like to be confident – ‘Oh, it’s got plenty of vegetation holding the soil.’ But it’s steep. Once something’s really forested, I think you lose track of how steep it actually is under there,” Brown said.
“Part of what we have to pay to live in such a beautiful, dramatic landscape is sometimes, the drama looks like this,” she added.
The threat is only growing as temperatures rise – and weather grows more extreme – with climate change.
