After the water receded from this week’s all-time record breaking glacial outburst flood, Mendenhall Valley residents spent Thursday taking stock of the damage.
Jeff Garmon’s bottom floor flooded on Meander Way. He spent the day drying out his belongings on a tarp in the front yard.
Garmon is head of the National Weather Service in Juneau.
“You’d think a meteorologist could choose better where to buy a house, but there wasn’t a lot of availability when we bought a house,” he said.
The temporary levee that the city put up this spring protected hundreds of homes, but water seeped through in some areas. The leakage caused the most damage at the end of Meander Way, where a handful of homes had flooded crawl spaces and garages.
City engineers say they will be assessing every single HESCO block that makes up the levee, and will make a plan for how to reinforce them ahead of next year’s flood.
On View Drive, a street along the river not protected by the city’s barrier, residents report that flooding was more catastrophic than ever before.
It reached chest height in Douglas Smith’s garage, and about six inches in his first-floor bedroom. Water went over the aluminum siding and vapor barrier in his house.
“We raised our family here, but now we’re trying to think of options,” Smith said. “Maybe it’s not realistic to stay here, because we don’t — we’ve kind of exhausted all the possibilities that we know so far to protect it.”
On Long Run Drive, Beth Cayce has stayed dry for the third year in a row. She she originally didn’t want the city to build a levee in her yard.
“I’m glad they did, now, in hindsight, because had these barriers not been in place, we would have been flooded,” Cayce said.
City officials are going door to door to assess the damage. They plan to report how many homes were hit and the total cost of the damage soon.
The city plans to hold a press conference at 11 a.m. Friday. KTOO will carry it live at ktoo.org/flood.
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