KRBD - Ketchikan

A landslide in Ketchikan Sunday night trapped nearly a dozen people on a remote stretch of road north of the city.

Borough Mayor Rodney Dial said the slide happened around 8 p.m. Sunday on Revilla Road past Ward Lake. There are few houses in that area, but it is near a paintball field and popular hunting areas — and Revilla Road is the only way in or out.

“We had six vehicles out there containing eight passengers on the other side of the slide area. Fortunately, we didn’t have any injuries,” said Dial.

Dial said that by 9 p.m. the state Department of Transportation, the Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad, Ketchikan Public Facilities, and others were on scene with a backhoe and a loader to remove debris from the road to free the people trapped on the other side.

Dial said that by midnight, the backhoe was able to clear enough of a path through the debris field that most of the trapped victims could leave their vehicles behind and walk across to safety.

“They walked through and were picked up on this side,” said Jerry Kiffer of the Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad. “There’s one family that still remains behind the landslide, but they’ve decided they’re just going to hole up and stay in place and wait for DOT to get it cleared up.”

The family that decided to stay with their vehicle was Janet Lydia and her husband and two kids. Lydia said in a text message Monday morning that they were on their way back from hunting when they ran into the slide. It was at least 20 feet across and blocking both lanes with downed trees and mud. Lydia said that’s where they ran into the other people trapped on the far side of the slide with them.

“5 people hiked through the mess to go home last night,” she said, but her family didn’t want to “pack their young kids through the deep mess.” They chose to wait for the debris to be cleared but according to Lydia, they actually weren’t the only ones that stayed overnight.

“Two others in a truck are still out the road further,” she said. “We last saw them at Harriet Hunt Creek this morning when we finally went for a little drive.”

Lydia said that on Monday morning, they could hear people on the town side of the slide clearing debris with chainsaws – a group of citizen volunteers, Alaska State Troopers, DOT and others – and that her husband was currently doing the same on their side of the road.

The Ketchikan Borough said in a press release that a geologist was arriving Monday morning from Juneau to assess the stability of the hillside, roadway, and slide area before they begin larger-scale debris removal. As of 9 a.m. on Monday, North Tongass Fire and EMS Responders were still on scene. Kiffer said Ketchikan Volunteer Rescue Squad stood down but remains on standby since they believed everyone was accounted for.

The borough said that after all vehicles and passengers have made it safely to the Ketchikan side, DOT will close Revilla Road to through traffic at the North Tongass Highway junction, which includes access to Ward Lake.

This slide comes a month and a half after the fatal landslide near downtown Ketchikan killed one person and destroyed multiple homes.

The conditions on Sunday were somewhat similar to that late August Sunday when the fatal Third Avenue landslide came down over the White Cliff neighborhood. Following a mostly clear, bluebird Saturday, the rain came down hard and lasted the entire day.

Ketchikan is still recovering physically and emotionally from the downtown landslide that claimed the life of community member and city employee Sean Griffin in late August. Third Avenue Bypass was reopened about a week ago after being buried beneath that slide. During Sunday’s rain storm that preceded the Revilla Road slide, officials closed the Bypass again to monitor the slide area, a long rocky stretch that now looms above the road like a scar. They wanted to see if the heavy rains would cause any further danger. Engineers evaluated the slide area at 6 a.m. Monday morning and found no hazardous conditions. It was reopened for public use.

There is very little cell phone service north of town in Sunday’s Revilla Road slide area. Dial said that if you find yourself in a situation like this, it helps to have a backup form of communication.

“Just in those remote areas where there’s a lack of communication, it can really benefit an individual to have some ability to contact somebody and say, ‘My car broke down,’ or ‘We got hurt, send help.’” Dial said. “And so we would just really ask that people – if you’re going to go into very rural locations without communication capability – consider either some way of taking some emergency communication device with you, or at least leaving a trip plan with family members so they know when to expect you back, and if you haven’t arrived by that time, to go ahead and contact authorities.”

Update Monday, 2:40 p.m.:

A house fire in Ketchikan Sunday morning left one person dead and another critically injured.

The apartment building is located on Second Avenue, near the Aug. 25 landslide zone. Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said the neighbors in the apartment upstairs from the fire noticed smoke and called for help at about 8:30 a.m.

Firefighters arrived on scene within two minutes of being dispatched. Hines said they found light smoke coming out of the building and a small indoor fire that was easily extinguished.

Crews transported the two victims inside, a 34-year-old woman and a 63-year-old man, to PeaceHealth Medical Center, where the woman was pronounced dead. The man was medevaced to the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, where he is in critical but improving condition.

An initial investigation found that the fire started in the bathroom, then burned through the door to the attached bedroom. Hines said both victims, who were a couple, were harmed not by the flames in their home but by inhaling the smoke.

“Most, when I generalize fire victims across the United States, it is from smoke inhalation,” Hines said. “A fire produces toxic smoke. It’s going to be filled with cyanide, it’s going to be filled with carbon monoxide, and heat.”

According to authorities, the home had smoke detectors present, but they had been dismantled. Hines said these days, it’s even more important for residents to have working smoke detectors than it used to be because modern materials burn hotter and produce smoke more quickly.

“These things happen very, very, very rapidly in the modern home,” Hines said. “Almost everything in our homes nowadays is made of plastic, so basically gasoline derivatives, if you will.”

Three upstairs neighbors were evaluated and treated for smoke inhalation at the local hospital, then released. They and other residents of the building were evacuated due to smoke and water damage.

Hines said his heart goes out to the evacuated residents, who just recently got back into their home after being evacuated for weeks after the slide.

An annual report on Southeast Alaska’s economy shows a region firmly dependent on tourism with a struggling fishing sector. The findings were presented Tuesday at Southeast Conference in Ketchikan.

Meilani Schijvens owns Rain Coast Data and authors the annual Southeast by the Numbers report, which looks at the last calendar year. In her presentation, Schijvens said tourism has become the strong backbone of the panhandle’s economy.

“With our 8,300 jobs and nearly $350 million in earnings in the tourism sector, tourism is our number one job provider,” she said. “It’s been our number one job provider before, but for the first time ever this year, tourism is our number one wage provider in Southeast Alaska.”

The region had a record-breaking number of cruise passengers last year, and is projected to see a marginal increase for 2024. Schijvens expects that number to flatten and possibly decrease slightly in the coming years. That’s due to agreements in Juneau capping the number of ships and passengers per day starting in 2026.

In an interview after the presentation, Schijvens said that what happens in Juneau is felt across the region.

“Pretty much every single cruise ship that comes into Southeast Alaska comes to Juneau,” she said. “And of course, that could change in the future, and maybe there’ll be one or two that aren’t visiting Juneau, but that’s pretty much the said itinerary. So if there’s passenger limits in Juneau, it ends up being passenger limits more across Southeast as well.”

Seafood was the primary money maker for the region two years ago, but fell sharply last year. That wasn’t for a lack of trying — fishermen landed more pounds of fish than they had in the last decade. But the prices paid for that fish were so low that the overall catch value dropped 20%.

Schijvens said that crash in prices was driven by global factors out of the state’s control.

“There was a global downturn in seafood demand that was coupled with some really big seafood harvests, and we saw overfishing in Russia, as Russia tried to fish for salmon their way out of being able to afford to pay for the Ukraine war,” she said.

State government jobs were historically a top regional job producer, which makes sense, since the state capital is in Juneau. But Schijvens said those numbers were down last year for the 12th year in a row.

“The rest of Alaska, minus Southeast Alaska, we’ve seen the growth of 1000 state jobs over the last year since 2022,” she said. “We’ll see where those numbers end up, but those are some of the early numbers. So the state of Alaska is hiring, they’re just not hiring in Southeast.”

Schijvens said overall, the economy is strong. Wages are up, inflation is down and job numbers have finally made a full recovery from the pandemic.

But the persistent statewide challenge of population decline remains, which is even more pronounced in Southeast, due to the region’s relatively older population. More seniors mean less children and more retirees leaving the state.

A long line of garbage trucks, electric repair vehicles, fire engines and police cars idled outside the Ketchikan Mortuary last week as they waited to accompany landslide victim Sean Griffin’s remains to the airport.

The dozens of city vehicles formed a procession Aug. 27 to honor the longtime public works employee. Griffin was the only person killed by the slide two days earlier, while helping clear storm drains on his day off.

Sven Westergard is the assistant business manager for the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers chapter where Griffin was a member. He said he knew him from growing up in the same town, but they really became friends when they started working together.

Westergard said Griffin didn’t like being in the spotlight, something he recalled joking about on the day of the procession.

“We were like, ‘Holy cow, this is amazing,’” Westergard said. “And it was like, ‘Well, Sean would be grumbling about him being the front of attention.’”

Griffin started his career with the city working as a solid waste collector. Westergard said he had a good sense of humor, and helped start a tradition of giving residents a thumbs-up while driving garbage trucks through town.

“I think they got pulled on the carpet one time because they thought they were actually like flipping people off,” Westergard said. “So then it proceeded to one or two of the crews, to the whole garbage crew, to everybody in the city was driving around giving each other thumbs-up.”

In his 17 years of public service, Griffin had progressed from a trash collector to an operator, then moved to be a street maintenance technician, and had recently been promoted to senior maintenance technician. But Westergard said Griffin always looked out for colleagues who were just getting started.

“Sean kind of took a lot of those guys under his wing and helped them out,” Westergard said. “And now they’ve moved on to other job opportunities and some of them are running pretty big companies, all just because of the start they had.”

Brian Gilson worked with Griffin for 12 years in the solid waste department.

“He could work circles around everybody he worked with. He didn’t shy away from anything hard,” Gilson said. “So his work ethic is probably one of the best out there.”

That work ethic and commitment to his colleagues explain why the 42-year-old Griffin went to help out the streets crew on a day he wasn’t supposed to be working. A massive landslide tore through Ketchikan on Sunday, Aug. 25, taking Griffin’s life and destroying several homes.

His coworker Chris Riley was injured in the slide and taken to the hospital, but the City of Ketchikan recently announced that he is recovering well and expected to be released soon.

Gilson said Griffin was a family man, and always prioritized taking care of his four boys and wife, Sarah.

Griffin was an outdoorsman, and both Gilson and Westergard talked about how much he liked working on cars — that he could take a bunch of old parts and build them into a functioning vehicle.

Westergard said he’ll remember Griffin as a great guy who could always cheer him up at the right time.

“Being out on the road or doing something and just having a crap day and all of a sudden, here’s the honk and thumbs up or the goofy comment off to the side,” he said.

Westergard said one of the great things about Ketchikan is the shared value of looking out for one another.

“It’s now more important because there’s going to be a lot of families and friends that are hurting over this, and it’s gonna be a long haul for Ketchikan to recover,” Westergard said. “And so I just hope that everybody keeps that in mind and, you know, keep an eye out for each other.”

Michael Fanelli is the KRBD News Director. He can be reached at michael@krbd.org.

On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski stood on Ketchikan’s Third Avenue Bypass in a reflective safety vest with local officials. All around her, crews with heavy machinery worked to clear layers of mud and debris from the roadway. She looked up the collapsed slope and down at the devastation below from last week’s deadly landslide.

“After all these years and nothing happened – you got rain, you got wind – but now all of a sudden, this decides to let loose in a way that is so dramatic,” Murkowski said.

Local officials and those leading response efforts told Murkowski that the cleanup and geological surveying efforts after the Aug. 25 slide would likely take a long time. The senator said she thinks crews must still be running on adrenaline at this point.

“And you know it’s probably not going to be until everyone’s able to take a deep breath that you begin to feel pretty, pretty low,” Murkowski told those leading the clean-up efforts.

She said she understood that many of the men and women working among the debris knew Sean Griffin, the man who died in the slide. Some of them were his coworkers. Griffin was an employee with the city’s public works department. He was clearing storm drains in the area when the landslide struck. Murkowski said the delegation and the state want to offer material and emotional support.

“This is really hard on a small community,” Murkowski said. “To lose somebody, and particularly somebody that’s a local guy with a family here and one of your one of your coworkers. So this is really hard for us.”

Murkowski told officials that she would work to secure federal dollars for rebuilding efforts and put longer-term investments in place for monitoring and preventing future landslides. She didn’t specify where that potential funding was coming from.

It’s also not clear whether the Federal Emergency Management Association will make federal resources available. The state of Alaska has activated its Individual Assistance program to provide relief funds for Ketchikan’s landslide survivors.

Down the hill, there is even more debris on Second Avenue where the slide smashed through the residential neighborhood.

Murkowski walked into one of the houses adjacent to the slide with Fire Chief Rick Hines. The exterior looks fine. It was not hit by any of the mud and debris like its neighbor. But the inside is trashed. Insulation and air ducts hang from the ceiling beneath buckled support beams. Hines said it didn’t experience a physical impact, but the sheer force of the air moving down the mountain with the tons of mud and rock nearly caved the roof in.

“I can’t think – I can’t imagine the intensity of that,” Murkowski said.

“Right?” Hines replied. “So when you ask ‘Is this house totaled?’ My answer is probably going to be yes.”

A few feet away, a house lies tipped on its side among the knots of downed trees. It was hurled sideways into the house across the street. There were people inside that flipped house when it was thrown from its foundation. But they walked away.

Murkowski echoed what many have said in the days after this slide: It’s a miracle the death toll wasn’t higher.

Murkowski has a deep connection to Ketchikan – it’s where she was born. As we passed an evacuated home a couple of blocks from the slide, Murkowski pointed out a light green house.

“My cousin Jenny grew up right there,” she said. “Yeah, it’s just kind of a normal street. It’s not a dangerous street. There’s nothing crazy going on here.”

Ketchikan Mayor Dave Kiffer told the senator that it wasn’t just property that was destroyed – the slide shattered the community’s sense of security.

“And also just the general peace of mind that we’ve had here for decades is destroyed, and that’s the reality,” he said.

Murkowski finished her visit with a trip to the emergency shelter at Ketchikan High School, where she met with families who were displaced by the slide. It was not clear Friday afternoon when the remaining evacuated residents will be able to return to their homes.

State Individual Assistance and Temporary Housing programs are accepting applications from “survivors with damages or emergency expenses” related to the landslide, the city and borough said. Registration is available by phone at (844) 445-7131 or online at https://ready.alaska.gov/Recovery/IA Additional updates will be provided at https://www.kgbak.us/1098/3rd-Avenue-Bypass-Landslide, authorities said. Text alerts are available through Nixle by texting 99901 to 888-777.

Ketchikan Police Chief Jeffrey Walls has agreed to retire in exchange for state prosecutors dropping five misdemeanor assault charges against him.

The charges stem from a 2022 altercation at the Salmon Falls Resort north of Ketchikan. During the incident, Walls allegedly shoved a Washington state man headfirst into a wall, leaving him bloodied, and then put him in a chokehold. The man had allegedly bumped or fallen into Walls and his wife twice before the altercation.

The City of Ketchikan had placed Walls on paid administrative leave while it conducted an internal investigation but reinstated him in Sept. 2023 after a felony assault charge against him was dropped.

Walls’ trial had been scheduled for Sept. 10, but in an agreement filed in Ketchikan Superior Court Wednesday, Walls agreed to retire effective Sept. 9 and relinquish his right to work in law enforcement in Alaska or seek law enforcement employment anywhere else in the country.

Walls has maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing.

This story has been updated to reflect that Chief Walls has agreed to “retire” as opposed to “resign.”