Glacial Outburst Flooding

Engineers from the City and Borough of Juneau are taking a close look at damage the temporary levee sustained during the record-breaking glacial outburst flood on the Mendenhall River last week. 

Some sections of the levee leaked, flooding a couple dozen homes. But it protected hundreds of others. 

Nick Druyvestein, an engineering associate at the city, has spent the week inspecting each HESCO block that makes up the levee built along 2.5 miles of the river. 

“I’m looking for tears in the fabric, any damage to the wire mesh, popped welds — really just looking to see if they’re they’re still standing up straight and if there is any damage,” he said. 

Some parts of the levee seeped, sank into the soil or lost sand through the bottom.

A tree punched a hole through one section near Dimond Park Field House, but the water didn’t rise high enough to flood through there. 

City staff are reaching out to homeowners to find out how they saw the levee perform during and immediately after the flood. Once they gather all of that information, they’ll create a damage assessment report. The report will help the city plan repairs and improvements to the levee before the next flood. 

“Our basis of design last year was to try and put everything four feet above what we saw the year before, but obviously, this year we saw higher levels in some areas,” Druyvestein said.

Water surged just inches from the levee’s top in some spots. 

Nate Rumsey, the city’s deputy director of engineering and public works, said he didn’t expect it to get that close since the peak flood height was less than 17 feet.

“There was water higher on the face of the barriers in certain sections than we anticipated based on the modeling that we did,” Rumsey said.  

So, city engineers say they’ll account for a potentially bigger flood as they prepare for the next major flood. They don’t have a timeline yet for when repairs will begin.  

In some years, Suicide Basin has released floodwaters more than once. But subsequent releases have historically been minor. Last year that happened in October.

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 dollars 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. 

Juneau’s 2025 glacial outburst flood may be over, but recovery and repairs are still ongoing. 

Juneau’s Back Loop Bridge remains closed for the foreseeable future due to damage from last week’s record-breaking glacial outburst flood. 

Sam Dapcevich with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities said emergency repairs are currently underway, but he did not have a timeline for when it will reopen to the public. 

“We’re hurrying,” he said. “We’re trying to get it open as quick as we can, but also focused on safety and determining what’s going to need to be done for the long-term fix.”

Restoration of power and internet services has been quicker. 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, requiring Alaska Electric Light & Power to cut power to some areas. 

Debbie Driscoll with AEL&P said power was restored once the flood waters receded. But, she said the flood also crippled a power pole adjacent to Back Loop Bridge, which caused additional outages in some nearby neighborhoods. 

Driscoll said the power has since been temporarily restored to the impacted neighborhoods and a more permanent fix is expected to be completed later this week. 

“We basically made it so that power was isolated and no longer being served to that pole, and then we were able to serve customers through alternate means,” she said.  

Internet provider Alaska Communications also confirmed its services have been restored locally.

Multiple local agencies are assisting in the recovery and cleanup effort. The first round of debris collection from flood-impacted neighborhoods on View Drive, Marion Drive, Meander Way and Meadow Lane began Monday, according to the city.  

More information about flood recovery and resources can be found on the city’s website.

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Homes on View Drive were hit the hardest by Wednesday’s glacial outburst flood. Now, as residents there dry out, they’re mulling over a federal buyout program to leave the street for good.

The city reported Friday that 47 homes flooded, but most of the damage was minor in areas protected by the city’s new temporary levee. View Drive is not protected by that levee.

The day before the flood, Don Habeger said he felt confident his home at the end of View Drive would make it out dry. But Wednesday evening, a loud generator pumped water from his bottom floor as he answered the door.

“If you look closely, you can see that the house did flood, and so we have recovery yet once again,” he said.

He had tried to avoid that. He and his neighbors paid thousands of dollars to build a colossal berm over the past month in a last-ditch effort to save their homes ahead of the glacial outburst flood. It failed. The berm stayed in place, but water still rose about 20 inches into Habeger’s ground floor — higher than the record-breaking flood last year.

Habeger had put his faith in the berm, so he didn’t take back-up measures like putting up sandbags or moving his furniture to the second story. 

“There’s somewhat of a numbing effect in your mind after one of these events, and it’s difficult to get on to the next day or the next day, and so I’m just trying to get through today,” he said on Wednesday evening after floodwaters receded.

Volunteers are helping him and his wife tear out wet insulation and dry what can be salvaged from their flooded family room. 

At this point, the Habegers see two possible paths forward: fight the flood again next year, or cut their losses and move away. They’re not sure which path they’ll take.

View Drive is a dead-end street in Mendenhall Valley surrounded on three sides by Mendenhall River. Some properties here have flooded for more than a decade, but the past three years have been catastrophic. That’s because outburst floods have grown bigger as Suicide Basin has expanded to hold more water, and the city’s temporary levee didn’t extend to this street. 

Scientists don’t yet know how big the floods could get, and staff at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say a long-term solution that would protect the entire Valley, including View Drive, is years away. 

Brett Nelson is Alaska’s conservation engineer at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The federal agency oversees a recovery buyout program, which pays people to move out of natural disaster zones. 

In July, he met with city staff and some residents of View Drive to explain how the program works to purchase homes, demolish them and transform the land into a park. 

“People need a little time to mull the situation over. And that was basically the intent of that initial meeting,” Nelson said.

Nelson estimates the total project could cost somewhere between $18 and $20 million, assuming every View Drive homeowner decides to leave. But the program is voluntary and some people may choose to stay. 

Right now, the agency is in the process of appraising the 20 properties on the street. Nelson said that process is a bit complicated. 

“There’s two options: They can either be done based on the value, right now, the day the appraisal is being done, they can be valued, or they can be appraised as of the day before last year’s jökulhlaup,” he said. “The catch is, all the properties have to go the same direction.”

The agency has the final say over how homes are appraised, but Nelson said they want to respect residents’ wishes. That appraisal decision will affect the overall price tag of the project, since homes are worth more before they’ve been damaged multiple times. 

If the buyout moves forward, Nelson said the cost would be split. The federal government would cover 75% and a local sponsor would cover 25%.

City Manager Katie Koester said she’s exploring potential partnerships with conservation nonprofits that could help pay for the city’s portion if the Juneau Assembly votes to move forward after the appraisal is done. 

“The Assembly has been very supportive of us engaging in that conversation, but it is an Assembly-level decision,” Koester said.

Elizabeth Figus lives on View Drive and is drying out after a third year of major flooding in a row. She sees the buyout program as her best option since the city hasn’t made plans to protect her street, but she has questions at this early stage in the process. 

“Are we going to be assessed at like, way below what we would expect or need even to, like, pay off our mortgage and move on?” she said. “Perversely, are the people who haven’t gotten wet yet just going to be getting some sort of handout that also might make the Assembly say we can’t afford this?”

Figus also said it would make sense to compare the cost of turning the street into parkland with the cost to protect it somehow. 

But Nate Rumsey, the city’s deputy director of engineering and public works, said the city hasn’t done an official assessment of what it would take to protect View Drive. He said it’s probably not viable to put HESCO barriers there because the soil might not hold up under their weight. Last year, a sinkhole opened in the middle of the street due to flooding. 

Several fans blow in Douglas Smith’s ground-floor bedroom, where a layer of fine grey silt covers the floor after floodwaters breached the height of the aluminum siding he’d installed. 

He said that he loves his community in Juneau and planned to spend the rest of his life here. Now, he’s thinking of taking a buyout and moving somewhere in the Lower 48.

“At this point, if that works, we’ll probably take it,” he said of the buyout program. “It’s probably our best option, because there doesn’t appear to be an option for protecting the house, and you know, what else are we going to do?”

Difficult decisions for View Drive residents and the Juneau Assembly are expected in the coming months, once NRCS issues its assessment of the street. Nelson said that if the buyout moves forward, the process would take around a year. 

Find more glacial outburst flooding coverage at ktoo.org/flood. 

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.

KTOO 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.

Juneau city officials are looking at everything from dams to explosives to keep Mendenhall Valley residents safe from future glacial outburst floods. 

As Suicide Basin fills up each year, Mendenhall Valley residents are more anxious about the coming flood. They want the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to figure out a permanent fix and build it quickly, but the Corps says a long term solution could take years.

The third episode of Outburst looks at how other countries have protected residents from glacial outburst floods and why a local solution is taking so long. 

KTOO’s Alix Soliman takes listeners from a Swiss community facing similar threats to the halls of the U.S. Senate to understand when residents might get a permanent fix – and what that might look like. KTOO reporter Clarise Larson cowrote this episode.

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.