Flood barriers meant to protect Mendenhall Valley homes from glacial outburst floods are on their way to Juneau. This week, city contractors started doing site assessments at homes where the barriers will be installed.
Contractors walked through Dan Wayne’s backyard on Tuesday morning to plot the location of the temporary levee. It will be made of steel cages filled with sandbags, called HESCO barriers. Each one is 3 feet wide, 3 feet long and 4 feet tall.
Wayne’s small backyard, which extends 20 feet out from his house, is expected to shrink by half. He also won’t be able to see or access an adjacent lot he purchased next to the river.
“It has a pond on it with wildlife and birds and so forth,” he said. “We have a dinghy that we row out there.”
Instead, all he’ll see is a wall.
Although water has crept right up to his property line, Wayne says his home has never flooded in the 28 years he’s lived there. He has mixed feelings about the barriers.
“I want my neighbors to be flood-free,” he said. “I’m happy to be part of it, but I feel like it should have been handled better.”
He’s among the 466 landowners who will pay about $6,300 over the next 10 years to foot the bill for 40% of the installation cost. Juneau taxpayers will cover the other 60%.
Wayne says he wishes the city would better compensate landowners who will be hosting the hulking barriers for an unknown length of time — potentially years — while city planners consider longer-term solutions.
“We, of course, would like these barriers to be up for as short of a time as possible, but we just don’t know how long that will be,” said City Manager Katie Koester at an assembly meeting on Monday.
She highlighted that landowners will be able to make specific requests to limit the impact of construction on their lives, like having contractors work when babies aren’t sleeping and moving fences for dogs.
Dan Allard, an Emergency Management Specialist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says the agency is paying roughly $4 million for the materials.
“So what is coming is 37,800 linear feet of HESCO barrier, 112,000 regular size sandbags, 400 super sacks — which are very large sandbags,” Allard said.
Although the Army Corps won’t be responsible for installation, since the city is managing that, Allard says it won’t be pretty when the heavy machinery rolls in.
“I know it’s going to be a muddy mess in everybody’s yard,” he said.
Property assessments are ongoing and the barriers are due to arrive in the next few weeks. But the installation date is still unknown.
