Bridget Dowd

In January, Juneau’s Riverbend Elementary School was forced to close and temporarily relocate. About two-thirds of the school flooded with water when two pipes burst during a cold snap.

For several weeks, Riverbend Elementary teachers held their classes at Chapel by the Lake, a church about two miles up the road from the school. There, students were seated around tables instead of desks and they switched to indoor play time instead of recess because the church didn’t have a playground.

Now, students and staff are back in their old building, but Riverbend principal Elizabeth Pisel-Davis said it’s not quite the same.

“All of our floors are cement and most of the walls are drywall,” Pisel-Davis said. “Here in our main hall, it’s all the way up to the ceiling. But in other areas, it’s up to about three or four feet. That was all of the drywall that had to be taken out because it was wet.”

Just down the hall, students are filing out of a large classroom that has been turned into a temporary exercise room. Staff are calling it “The Riverbend Pop Up Fitness Studio.”

“We don’t have a gym right now,” Pisel-Davis said. “Since we can’t do the typical soccer, basketball and things like that, students are doing yoga and calisthenics and different kinds of things in this smaller space, but it’s been working really great.”

She put out a call for yoga mats on Facebook and now the fitness studio has plenty of padding to protect the kids from the room’s cement floor. The building does have a gymnasium, but right now, Pisel-Davis said it’s full of teachers’ things.

When the school flooded, everything that could be saved was moved to the gym.

“And then when we found out we were able to come back, but we knew that we’d have to move out again at the end of the school year,” Pisel-Davis said. “We didn’t want to unpack all the things in the gym. In fact, we’re kind of slowly adding to them and only having in our classrooms what we need right now.”

They’ll have to move out of classrooms again this summer because there’s still work to be done. Some classrooms are still closed. Several doors have bright pink signs on them that say, “Do not enter. Construction Zone.”

“They weren’t able to be restored to a place where we could open them back up again because of ongoing leaks from the roof and things not being able to be repaired before the summer,” Pisel-Davis said.

In the classrooms that are being used, desks sit on top of temporary flooring — sheets of plywood and large pre-cut squares of carpet.

Some students have been writing opinion pieces about which building they liked learning in more — Chapel by the Lake or their partially repaired building. Third-grader Alexandria Torba said she liked Riverbend a lot before it flooded.

“I think I like Chapel by the Lake better because you can get more exercise because you also have to walk up a bunch of stairs and stuff,” she said.

But Torba’s classmate Edalynne Roters said it’s good to be back.

“I think it just feels comforting,” Edalynne said. “I’m just kind of more used to it.”

And she said at Chapel by the Lake, her class had to share a space with others.

“It was a little loud having two classrooms in the same room,” Edalynne said. “So it’s kind of nice to have some more quiet.”

Construction crews are waiting until students are out for the summer before finishing repairs on the roof, putting in carpet and painting the walls.

Juneau residents have an opportunity to meet the candidates for the Thunder Mountain High School principal job Tuesday night.

The Juneau School District has completed a nationwide search for applicants and narrowed it down to three finalists who are all from Alaska.

They include Shawn Arnold, who is the Juneau School District director of student services, Karen Keck who is a teacher at Kotzebue Middle High School, and Laura Scholes who is assistant principal for Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School.

All three finalists will be in the Thunder Mountain library from 5 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday. 

“Parents or members of the community are welcome to come,” said Juneau School District Chief of Staff Kristin Bartlett.

“There will be comment cards there so they can provide feedback in writing,” she said. “Then the following morning there will be interviews and those interviews are also open to the public.”

During the interviews, the candidates will be questioned by parents, administrators and teachers. 

Thunder Mountain is the largest school in the district. There were nearly 600 students enrolled there at last count. The last principal left in the spring of 2021. During the fall semester, the school had an interim principal, but there hasn’t been a principal this semester.

Angela Noon is an English teacher at Thunder Mountain and she has a daughter who attends school there. Noon said the school has seen the impact of being without a principal.

“We’ve really felt the lack, and I know our administration is doing the best they can, but they’re overwhelmed right now,” she said.

Noon said teaching and leading the school during the COVID-19 pandemic has not been easy for anyone there. So she’s hoping the new principal will be an effective communicator who is able to convey a vision for the school with both staff and families.

“We have to build relationships with our families,” Noon said. “You know the view should be that we are a team to help the students succeed and I think the principal has to lead that.”

Noon said that means being visible to the students and reaching out to the community. She said she also hopes the new principal will have a good understanding of the people the school serves, including its Alaska Native students. 

“In Alaska, with our history with our Native students, there are some very dark times,” Noon said. “So we want to build those bridges and really help our Native students succeed. It has been one of the things I think our district has struggled with.”

Following Wednesday’s interviews, the district should have a recommendation for its chosen candidate within a few days.

Stepping inside the main Barnacle Foods warehouse in Lemon Creek is like walking into a kitchen pantry. The smell of the herbs used to make the company’s sauces and spices hit all at once. 

A plastic curtain divides the commercial kitchen from shelves where pallets of merchandise are stored. On the very top shelf, there are cardboard boxes with the word “collapse” written on them in thick black marker. 

Barnacle Foods sells its kelp salsa, hot sauce and pickles all over the country. They harvest the kelp locally, and it’s processed at their facility in Lemon Creek.

The company rents space in an adjacent building where they usually store merchandise — extra production materials like caps and glass as well as shipping supplies. But in mid-January, an employee was between the two buildings trying to open their outdoor freezers, which had iced over. 

Barnacle Foods co-founder Lia Heifetz said that’s when disaster struck. 

“He started to hear something happening in this building, and like, felt something happening,” Heifetz said. “It sounded like a big truck was coming around the corner or something, so he was kind of looking over here like, ‘What’s the grumbling?’”

At the time, Heifetz was upstairs across the way.

“I looked out this window, which is right where my office is, and just saw the whole thing level basically in seconds,” Heifetz said.

The building had collapsed under heavy snow loads from January’s storms. No employees were inside, and no one was injured. Which was lucky — another employee had been in the building just a few minutes before it fell.

“Our team took off a few days after that,” Heifetz said. “A lot of people were pretty shaken up, and we also just wanted to give the building some space and our building some space. You know, there was still a lot of rain coming down and still a lot of snow.”

The collapse also put a hold on outgoing orders.

“We have a fairly vibrant online business and are shipping out palettes of orders every few days, and we thought we lost a lot of product,” Heifetz said.

At first, they thought everything they’d stored in the building was lost, including 10,000 jars of kelp pickles, which are only produced seasonally. But when the salvage crew started picking through the rubble, there was good news. 

“We were really pleasantly surprised that a lot of the product was completely untouched, and most of the items we were able to dry out and will be able to use,” Heifetz said.

What’s left of the warehouse is now covered in plastic. Heifetz said they’re just grateful to have understanding customers, a supportive community and healthy employees. 

“We feel extremely lucky,” Heifetz said. “This could’ve been a much harder hit on our business, and we’re doing relatively just fine. Everyone is safe, and the items that we had to get rid of are replaceable.”

For now, Barnacle Foods has moved its extra product into another storage space. The future of the old building is still uncertain. 

Juneau City Hall was a little busier than usual on Friday as second graders from Harborview Elementary made their way in from the snow, following instructions from their teacher, Diane Antaya. 

Antaya said the kids made the trek because they’ve been learning a lot about cities.

“Coming to City Hall is very empowering, even for young children,” Antaya said. “They get the sense of the importance of working together to make something great like Juneau.”

The class filed into the Juneau Assembly chambers where Mayor Beth Weldon started showing them around.

“You can see all of the names of our Assembly members,” Weldon said. “That’s one of the things I like to ask the adults if they can name all the Assembly members and most of the time they can’t.”

She told the second graders a little bit about what Assembly members do and explained her role as their executive officer. 

“My job is to try to keep them in line, probably like your teacher in your classroom,” Weldon said. “Sometimes she does a good job keeping you guys in line and sometimes it’s a little hard for you wiggle worms to hold still and do what you’re told, so very similar to the Assembly.” 

She went on to tell the class about some of the things that make Juneau a unique city, like the fact that it owns an airport and a ski resort.

A few students had the chance to ask Weldon a question. One student asked if Weldon liked being the Mayor.

“Most of the time,” Weldon said. “Not all the time. COVID has been a bit of a challenge for all of us, but it’s really fun getting to meet lots of new people and to try and find laws that help people.”

Other students had more complex questions, like how the city keeps Juneau’s landfill from filling up.

“This is going to be an interesting question,” Weldon answered. “We’re not. The landfill will just keep getting more giant … By regulation, it can only go so high. We’re trying to figure out ways to make that smaller or else we’re going to have to ship it out of town.”

To end their visit, the second graders had an opportunity to sit in Assembly member chairs and take part in a mock vote. They were asked to decide whether roosters should be allowed in neighborhoods.

Willym Koester sat in Assembly member Carole Triem’s chair and gave his opinion on the rooster issue.

“I think no,” he said. “Because they can nip at you and that sometimes hurts.”

The rooster ordinance failed 7-2. 

The Juneau City Manager’s office has released its recommendations for how to use the money that’s expected to come from this year’s cruise ship visitors. Residents have until March 4 to weigh in on those suggestions.

Juneau gets money from cruise passengers through three different fees: $5 per passenger from the state’s commercial passenger vessel fee; $3 from a port development fee and $5 from the city’s marine passenger fee.

This year, the city is estimating that about 1 million passengers will come to Juneau, generating about $13.8 million in passenger fees.

Some of the suggestions include installing refillable water bottle stations downtown and funding visitor services. Juneau Tourism Manager Alexandra Pierce said that means hiring crossing guards, beefing up security and restroom maintenance for some of Juneau’s docks.

“That’s a significant funding increase because the Coast Guard issued an additional security requirement that cost quite a bit more money to implement,” Pierce said.

The city is also carrying a negative passenger fee fund balance of $3.2 million into this fiscal year. Pierce said that negative balance isn’t something that usually happens.

“Typically, we like to have a little bit of money left over, but we had two years with no visitation and then very limited visitation for which we needed to still supply some of the services that we always do and so that’s where the negative balance came from,” Pierce said.

The services she’s referring to are city departments like police, ambulances and visitor information. The City Manager’s office is suggesting they use some of the passenger fee proceeds to repay the negative balance. 

Over the course of a normal summer, Juneau sees about 1.2 million cruise ship passengers from large ships. In 2021, with tourism and the cruise industry still reeling from the pandemic, only about 125,000 of those passengers made it to the city. Pierce said for the next fiscal year, they budgeted for fewer passengers than a pre-pandemic year, but still more than Juneau saw last season.

“With some nervousness around industry recovery and the possibility of another variant, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now,” Pierce said. “But we also recognize that people are returning to travel and that we probably will see a pretty robust season this year.”

Pierce said they expect every ship currently on the schedule will still come, but questions remain about how full those ships will be.

People can submit comments on the recommendations to Alexandra Pierce by mailing them to the City Manager’s Office at 155 S. Seward Street, Juneau, Alaska 99801 or via email.

A series of slides has left both of Juneau’s Perseverance access trails and parts of Basin Road blocked by snow and debris.

Sally Schlicting is a Juneau resident and frequent Perseverance Trail hiker. She says she and her husband walked up there a few days ago to see the aftermath of a recent landslide.

“It’s taken out the Ebner adit entrance,” she said.

That’s an entrance to the Ebner Mine.

“Or at least it’s buried it, and it looks like it’s undercut the trail on the way up to the overlook that kind of looks over Gold Creek and the basin,” she said.

Schlicting says she’s worried because the slide area is treacherous, and so many people use it.

“That will have a big impact on people, you know — all the hikers, the runners, the mountain bikers and people who go up to go backcountry skiing,” she said.

Juneau Emergency Programs Manager Tom Mattice says an avalanche covered the trail from the top down, and a landslide started at the trail’s edge.

“The area is unstable, both with snow — there’s concern with trees and rocks and other things in it — as well as the trail has been undercut,” he said. “Where the landslide pulled out, the trail is very, very narrow, and now [there’s] just a precarious snow ledge hanging over a big, large landslide area.”

The area is not officially closed off, but Mattice says they’re asking people to recognize that it’s hazardous and stay away until it can be cleaned up. He says major maintenance needs to be done, but it’s not safe to do it yet.

“It’s going to be a combination of snow melting away but also not having a tremendous amount of rain,” he said. “When you’re working in and around a landslide area like that, you want to know that you’re not just sitting on eight inches of rain like we did from last couple days.”

Mattice says Juneau has seen some relatively large avalanches over the past few weeks. This path alone slid during the first week of January and then again this week.

“To have two avalanches in that period of time that are both notable in size is something,” he said. “To see it come all the way down to Basin Road, that’s the first time I’ve seen that in quite some time.”

Those events aside, mid-week conditions are fairly good, and Juneau’s avalanche danger is moderate. More rain and snow is expected to hit later in the week, though, so Mattice says conditions could change going into the weekend.

Daily avalanche advisories are posted online. You can also report slides you see to the Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center.