Alix Soliman

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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Floodwaters from Juneau’s glacial outburst are receding. The flood reached a record-breaking crest of 16.65 feet at about 8 a.m. Wednesday.

The temporary levee the city installed along the Mendenhall River this year protected hundreds of homes nearby. But water still leaked through some sections and flooded several streets.

In the middle of Meander Way, Sean Smack tugged a raft through muddy floodwaters. He ferried diesel jugs to neighbors so they could run generators to pump the water from their homes since power was cut Wednesday morning as the river level rose.

“The Meander Way water taxi service — once a year, have no fear,” he said.

He delivered a jug to Locke and Melissa Brown’s house. Water from their crawl space flowed through a bright green garden hose down their porch steps.

The Browns have HESCO barriers stacked up in their backyard. But water worked its way through the barriers and rose through storm drains, hitting a handful of homes at the end of Meander Way.

The Browns were glad that the barriers are there, even with the seepage. This is the third year in a row their home has flooded.

“If they weren’t here, it would have been catastrophic for us,” Locke Brown said.

It’s not as bad this time. But he says they want a long-term solution before they have to sell their home in a few years. Melissa is on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard.

“We’re going to be doing this for five years in total, and then we’re forced to move on military orders,” he said. “How are we going to sell our house?”

Around the corner, Andrew Hills walked along the grey pool in the middle of Northland Street with his toddler, Waylon, up on his shoulders. Their house got hit by the flood last year, but this year it was spared.

“This is awesome. I could not be happier,” Hills said. “I feel terrible for the people at the end of Meander, but, you know, really happy it didn’t hit us.”

He said he spent the night walking the streets and saw the barriers leaking.

At a press briefing Wednesday morning, Juneau City Manager Katie Koester said the barriers were largely a success.

“I know we’re not entirely out of the woods, but the HESCO barriers really have protected our community,” Koester said. “If it weren’t for them, we would have hundreds and hundreds of flooded homes.”

Building the levee was a controversial process, and it is considered a stop-gap solution. It’s only meant to work for around a decade, and the city doesn’t know how it would perform in floods higher than 18 feet. Experts still don’t know whether that could happen. This year’s record-breaking crest was more than half a foot higher than last year’s peak of 15.99 feet, which was also a foot higher than the previous year.

City officials are still assessing the damage and monitoring areas that saw some flooding, including parts of Meander Way, Meadow Lane, Marion Drive, Parkview Court, Center Court, View Drive, Long Run Drive, Betty Court, Gee Street and the Safeway parking lot.

Christopher Goins with the Alaska Department of Transportation said Back Loop Bridge was damaged by tree strikes and erosion. The bridge was closed to traffic Tuesday night.

“We are beginning to lose portions of the road associated with that abutment there, and that’s the main support where we have piles that go into the ground that hold up the bridge sections themselves,” he said Wednesday morning, adding that the bridge should be fine with some repairs.

The current swept away tons of trees from the riverbank, including one that crushed a HESCO barrier. The city reinforced it with massive sandbags called supersacks.

Nicole Ferrin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Juneau, noted the significance of this flood.

“This is a new all-time record-high crest for the Mendenhall Lake and river system,” Ferrin said.

The crest happened sooner than initially predicted. On Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service updated the forecast from an expected peak Wednesday afternoon to earlier that morning. Aaron Jacobs, senior service hydrologist at the agency, said that’s because rainfall from the prior few days masked when Suicide Basin started to release.

“It really hides the signal that we would be looking for if water was coming from Suicide Basin,” he said.

Jacobs said it now looks like the release began sometime on Monday morning.

Just outside the city’s emergency shelter on Floyd Dryden campus, Shari Weimer smoked a cigarette as sunshine broke through the fog. She and her husband Carl evacuated from Lakeview Court at around 10 p.m. Wednesday night.

“I’m right one street over from the river, and I just chose to evacuate because my life is worth more than home,” she said.

Their house flooded the past two years. This time, with a higher peak and concerns about the temporary levee, Shari said she didn’t want to deal with the panic again.

Just seven people stayed in the shelter overnight. Some residents stayed with friends and family in town, and others stayed home. Capital City Fire/Rescue Assistant Chief Sam Russell said during a Wednesday’s press conference that emergency responders did not need to make any rescues overnight as waters levels rose. 

The Juneau School District postponed the first day of school on Thursday until Friday in order to allow the area time to dry out.

Emergency officials issued an alert Wednesday afternoon that the flood threat had ended and evacuated areas are now open to residents only. The National Weather Service flood warning expires at 8 a.m. Thursday. 

This post has been updated. 

The flood reached a record-breaking crest of 16.65 feet at about 8:00 a.m. Water continues to seep into Valley neighborhoods.

The HESCO barriers stacked in backyards along the river are blocking many homes from flooding, but water is seeping under and through the barriers on parts of Marion Drive, Killewich Drive, Meander Way and Riverside Drive. View Drive is flooded — that street is not protected by a barrier.

Some roads along the river have pooled with water, with multiple homes pumping water out of their crawlspaces. Alaska Electric Light & Power has cut power to some flood-affected streets. 

Despite seepage, Ryan O’Shaughnessy, the city’s emergency program manager, says “there is no reason to believe there is imminent failure” of the HESCO barriers.

Some residents are reporting that water is reaching their properties when they hadn’t in prior floods. The city is helping residents pump out water from yards that have flooded.

The city is deploying supersacks to one section of the barriers where it appears a tree struck it — but no water has broken through at that point. The city continues to ask people to stay away from the area, and recommends evacuating immediately.

Find the latest news on glacial outburst flooding and resources for how to prepare at ktoo.org/flood.

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Juneau’s annual glacial outburst flood started Tuesday morning and is expected to peak Wednesday morning. Experts predict it could be the largest flood on record. 

This year, the flood will test a temporary levee that the city installed this spring. But not every street in the flood zone is protected by the barrier. 

As Malachi Thorington and Elizabeth Figus packed their blue chevy truck Tuesday afternoon to stay at a friend’s house, the sound of the rising river rushes behind their house. 

The first floor of their home flooded the past two years. Thorington said he knows the drill now.

“Just kind of dealing with the present, at the moment, basically going into damage mitigation mode. Try not to feel anything, just try to go as mechanical as possible,” he said. “There will be things that are lost, and I really hope that other people have taken this seriously.”

The City and Borough of Juneau issued an evacuation advisory Tuesday morning as glacial outburst floodwaters began to rise in Mendenhall River. Some residents are heeding the warning, but others are hunkering down at home. Everyone is waiting to see whether preparations made over the past year will protect their homes from a third catastrophic flood. 

At the end of View Drive, a colossal man-made berm separates Carol and Don Habeger’s house from the cold rushing water. 

Walking along the berm, they see a young spruce on the other side of the river crash into the torrent. Along with a couple of neighbors, the Habegers spent the past month erecting the levee around their home of more than 20 years. The city constructed a separate temporary levee farther downriver. 

“We are trying to save our property — we are trying to save our equity,” he said. 

Imagine 400 truckloads of boulders, rocks and fine sand stacked around 12 feet high. The couple plans to stay home, even as the river is projected to reach a record-breaking level of 16.6 feet.

“I was going to invite folks, but I don’t want the liability,” he said.

The Mendenhall River started flooding annually more than a decade ago, but for a while it was treated as more of a curiosity than a cause for concern. Then, in 2023, everything changed when a record-breaking 15-foot flood hit the Valley. A couple dozen homes flooded. 

The 2024 flood broke the record again, this time cresting at 16 feet, and it was catastrophic. Nearly 300 homes flooded. The federal government declared it a major disaster.

Glacial outburst floods are not uncommon in Alaska, or in other places with glaciers around the globe. But Juneau, Alaska is the only city in the U.S. that lives beneath their threat.

Suicide Basin is the source. It’s a slurry of water, icebergs and silver silt that swells with rain and meltwater in the spring and summer. 

Climate change has sharpened the risk of glacial outburst floods. In Juneau, their size has increased as the glacier has melted more rapidly. Scientists today are trying to figure out how big the floods can get.

At a press briefing Tuesday morning, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the National Weather Service Nicole Ferrin said the river was already unusually high because of rain from the past few days. 

“This will be a new record based on all of the information that we have,” she said. 

The city is encouraging residents to evacuate the area, but it’s not a mandatory order. On Monday, the city hung nearly 900 informational door flyers in Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods in the flood zone and launched a flood information hotline.

Residents can see whether their home is in the flood zone by visiting Juneauflood.com. Though city officials say they’re confident the barriers will hold, they don’t want people to test it with their lives. The area includes homes along the river, down Riverside Drive to Safeway, past Glacier Highway and near the Juneau International Airport.

Capital City Fire/Rescue Assistant Chief Sam Russell said emergency responses will become more difficult as the river rises. He asked residents to stay away from the river and bridges as much as possible.

“As the flood goes up, our ability to navigate the waters goes down due to the debris that flows down through it makes navigating the river with a boat very, very difficult,” he said. 

At the Floyd Dryden campus, the American Red Cross is prepared to receive people who follow the evacuation advisory. 

Michael Downs is the Juneau district ranger for Tongass National Forest. He closed down the Forest Service campground on Mendenhall Lake this morning. The few RVs that were there are now parked at the campus.

He said the Forest Service is also managing disaster tourism in the area – people wanting to get an in-person glimpse of the flooding. He said all lakeside trails and roads by the Visitor Center and near Skater’s Cabin are closed. Anyone who violates that could face consequences.

“This year, we just did a Forest Order that they can be fined up to like, $5,000 so [it’s] got a little bit more teeth this year,” he said. 

He said on top of being a safety concern, it’s to protect the employees. 

“Their homes are impacted, and they work there, and people are oohing and ahhing about their disaster and it’s yucky,” he said. “I prefer people don’t come in there.” 

Floodwaters are expected to peak Wednesday afternoon, and then drop through Thursday morning. 

This story has been updated to add more context about glacial flooding and reflect the latest National Weather Service forecast. 

Find the latest news on glacial outburst flooding and resources for how to prepare at ktoo.org/flood.

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The U.S. Coast Guard officially added the first icebreaker to its fleet in over 25 years during a ceremony on Sunday in Juneau – its future home port.

The ship’s commissioning signals an expanding U.S. military presence in the Arctic Ocean. But the icebreaker is also looking to overcome its past after a tumultuous maiden voyage more than a decade ago.

Down in the engine room of the Storis on Saturday, U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander George Greendyk walked in narrow passageways between loud diesel engines that slowly thrust the ship through the placid waters of Stephens Passage.

“We’re getting to the point where we’re pretty comfortable pretty much with the majority of the ship’s operations,” Greendyk said. “Now we just need to get control of the things that pop up only every once in a while.”

The Storis joins the Healy and the Polar Star as the third polar icebreaker that the U.S. military owns.

Juneau residents may have glimpsed the large red and white ship through the fog over the weekend, but it was only here for a little while before heading north.

Captain Corey Kerns said the icebreaker’s mission over the next couple of months has two main purposes: assert U.S. sovereignty and learn how to operate the ship, which is unlike any other in their fleet.

“In this case, we need Arctic presence was the most important thing.

He said that the U.S. has failed to keep pace with other nations, including Russia and China, in building polar icebreakers capable of navigating the waters of the far north. So Congress made the Coast Guard buy this one from the American company Edison Chouest Offshore for $125 million dollars.

“So we’re willing to take some risk or forced into it, because our shipbuilding projects are so behind, you know, to be honest,” Kerns said.

The Storis had some issues in its past life.

The ship was originally called Aiviq and was built to support oil drilling in the Arctic. It famously lost control of a Shell oil rig off the coast of Kodiak during its maiden voyage in 2012.

After the oil rig ran aground, government reports concluded there were issues with how the icebreaker was designed and with how the crew handled it in dangerous waters.

One of the main issues was the location of the fuel vents. Seawater flowed into the vents and caused the diesel engines to fail. Kerns says they’ve fixed that issue.

“So those were raised a little bit higher, which means you could take more water in vicinity of them before it would down-flood,” he said. “So not that it couldn’t possibly happen again, but it’s less likely.”

In addition to raising the fuel vents, the other major changes to the ship were painting the hull red, installing military satellite communication systems and adding an armory.

Kerns said the crisis with the oil rig was also a result of how the crew made decisions at the time.

“If you’re towing 100,000-ton ship in like 40-foot seas, that’s restricting the movement of your ship. No amount of design is going to save you from a bad, bad situation,” he said.

Before getting a ride-along for press and families of the crew underway, the ship sat at Auke Bay Ferry Terminal. The voyage was delayed for around two hours.

Kearns said a propeller malfunction was to blame. But it would be a quick fix once they got downtown.

“That’s some of the growing pains of us learning,” he said.

They’re learning from a civilian crew with Edison Chouest that is contracted to train the Coast Guard.

Commander Philip Baxa, chief of the Coast Guard’s Aids to Navigation and Ice Capabilities Division, helped negotiate the purchase of Storis. He said the ship’s home port will be Juneau — once the infrastructure is built.

“It doesn’t just stop at the waterfront with a pier. It’s the warehouses and workshops for our maintainers, but it’s also the housing units for the crew members and their families,” Baxa said.

The recent Trump-signed funding bill allocated $300 million to build the port. Baxa said it will take around a decade and that building sites have not yet been decided. He expects roughly 100 crew members and maintenance workers will be stationed in town.

The ship is planning to visit Seward, Kodiak and Dutch Harbor, then will head north through the Bering Strait over the next couple of months. Port calls are subject to change.

Hundreds of people in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley are living on the front line of a climate change disaster they didn’t see coming. This is Outburst, the story of how glacial outburst flooding has escalated faster than human imagination – and public policies to protect people.

The KTOO newsroom takes you from the floodwaters to the glacier’s edge to uncover why the annual floods happen, how they got out of control and what can be done to keep Juneau safe.

Suicide Basin is a slurry of water, icebergs and silver silt between jagged peaks, and it’s the source of Juneau’s annual glacial outburst flood. The Mendenhall Glacier revealed the basin as its retreat reshapes parts of Juneau’s topography.

Researchers say that understanding the basin and others like it is key to a better knowledge of  future glacial outburst floods. The second episode of Outburst takes us from the past, when early Mendenhall Valley residents were among the first record keepers of area floods, to  the present to hear how scientists are figuring out how big the danger could get. 

KTOO’s Alix Soliman is our guide from the basin’s edge to the Mendenhall River floodplains to understand what we know — and which questions are left unanswered.