A temporary levee in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley mostly held back record-breaking floodwaters during the glacial outburst last Wednesday. But water lapped just inches from the top and there was some leakage, which led to flooding in some homes.
Some Valley residents are worried the city’s temporary levee won’t hold up next year. City officials said they will stabilize the riverbank, repair the levee and build it higher for a flood that could break the record again.
At a Juneau Assembly meeting Monday, Debbie Penrose Fischer, who leads a flood advocacy group, called it a near miss.
“What if it had still been high tide and the rain had continued?” she said. “If those conditions had prevailed, many believe this would have been another flood disaster.”
Last year, her home on Gee Street flooded and she was rescued on a raft. Her home didn’t flood this year, but she said she still doesn’t feel safe.
The levee was controversial, and it is considered a stop-gap solution. The city doesn’t know how it would perform in floods larger than 18 feet. Experts still don’t know how big the flood could get, but it has grown over the past three years. It hit 15 feet in 2023, then 16 feet last year. Now, the record is 16.65 feet.
Twenty-five homes along the river flooded because the barriers leaked. Part of the levee on Riverside Drive slumped towards the rushing river because the water eroded the land beneath it.
City Manager Katie Koester said the HESCO barriers that make up the city’s levee sustained about $1 million worth of damage during the flood. She said she doesn’t know yet how the city will pay for repairs.
“It really demonstrated how temporary those HESCO barriers are in nature,” Koester said. “There’s a lot of vulnerabilities, there’s seepage, there’s undermining of the armament, right, that we have to care for.”
The city has not yet finalized the price of building the levee with materials donated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Koester said she expects it to be less than the $7.83 million budgeted for construction, but a pending lawsuit from homeowners could affect the final cost.
Researchers and officials are still evaluating data from the flood, including how fast the water flowed and how high it reached on the barriers. The city will use that information to plan for future floods.
Alyson Cooper lives in the flood zone and testified at the meeting to thank the city for building the temporary levee.
“I feel for my neighbors that got water in their house, but there weren’t very many of them,” she said. “Mostly, there were hundreds of homes that were spared, and there were hundreds of people like me whose lives were not turned upside down this year, and I just want to thank you.”
A long-term solution for annual flooding is expected to take years, though residents are urging Alaska’s congressional delegation to speed up the process.
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