Ketchikan races to clean up, fearing more landslides with the next storm

KETCHIKAN — Emergency crews on Tuesday were racing to clear tons of earth and downed trees from a landslide zone in Ketchikan before another storm front was expected to hit overnight, which officials fear could trigger further slides.

The devastating Third Avenue landslide struck a densely populated Ketchikan neighborhood Sunday afternoon. A City of Ketchikan public works employee was killed while clearing stormwater drains. Juneau firefighters assisting in Ketchikan confirmed that “four homes were a total loss with additional damage to several others,” officials said.

“Some (homes) we will not know for a while and some may have significant flood damage,” said Rodney Dial, mayor of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough.

Dial and Steve Rydeen, the borough’s fire chief and incident commander, surveyed the damage caused by the landslide Tuesday. Tons of earth and trees slid 1,100 feet down a steep hillside, crashing into homes below. The landslide was 250 feet wide at its widest point, officials said.

”It was a wall of water, of mud and everything,” Dial said, pointing downhill. “And it went right down there and flooded these houses.”

Since the Third Avenue slide, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources landslide hazard team has been monitoring the stability of the slope. Mort Larsen, a member of the state’s landslide team, said Tuesday that no landslide movement had been recorded in the area since Sunday afternoon.

On White Cliff Avenue, a red house rested against another home farther downhill. A huge pile of trees, logs and earth bore down on both. On Tuesday morning, residents raced to empty one of the houses of their mementos.

The steep hillside above them was once densely forested. Now, it has been turned into a 1,000-foot gully of loose earth and logs lying over bedrock. Without trees to anchor the soil, officials are concerned another storm could wash tons of debris down the hill, causing further devastation below.

Excavators on Tuesday worked quickly to remove masses of earth and logs that buried the Third Avenue Bypass above the affected neighborhoods. Crews with chain saws raced to cut downed trees to size. A jumble of broken trees hung precariously on steep slopes.

Third Avenue is expected to be closed for an extended period due to the magnitude of the slide, and the need to evaluate potential damage to the roadway and hillside. “Significant progress” was made on Tuesday to clear Third Avenue, with work planned “to restore proper drainage to the bypass and below,” officials said.

“It’s mostly just kind of a race against the weather,” Dial said.

The National Weather Service in Juneau was forecasting that a storm would hit Ketchikan late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. The rainy weather is anticipated through the weekend, but meteorologists say the worst of the storm will hit farther north — closer to Yakutat and Juneau.

“The way the weather systems are tracking right now, the majority of everything seems to be missing the southern Panhandle,” said Brian Bezenek, a lead meteorologist with the weather service in Juneau.

Sean Griffin, a 42-year-old City of Ketchikan public works employee, was on the Third Avenue Bypass clearing stormwater drains when Sunday’s landslide struck, trapping him in his vehicle. His body was recovered Monday, officials said.

Dozens of Ketchikan residents silently lined Tongass Avenue to honor Griffin on Tuesday afternoon. A long procession of city vehicles — dump trucks, fire engines and police cars — passed the site of the massive landslide where Griffin died.

Three people were hospitalized from the slide. One person was treated and released Sunday. Kate Govaars, a spokesperson for PeaceHealth, said two others were still patients at Ketchikan Medical Center on Tuesday. Citing privacy laws, Govaars said she could not publicly identify the patients or disclose their injuries in detail. She said both patients were in “stable condition” by Tuesday morning.

[Ketchikan city employee who was clearing storm drains on his day off died in landslide]

At Ketchikan High School, a dozen people sheltered for a second night, officials said. Principal Rick Dormer said around 25 to 30 people were coming to the school for meals. Stacks of donated food, clothes and toiletries sat ready for displaced residents to pick up.

Ketchikan schools were tentatively set to reopen Thursday, Dormer said. A new city shelter could open at another site, but that was still being discussed, he added.

Some First Avenue residents were able to return home Monday. Evacuation orders were lifted for residents on nearby streets Tuesday evening. A mandatory evacuation remained in place for some houses on a hard-hit stretch of Second Avenue. Rydeen said those homeowners would likely need to wait a while before they can return.

“It’s going to be a good week, maybe longer,” he said.

For others, the clean-up effort had been difficult. A child care center at the bottom of the hill flooded Sunday evening. Girlie Cruz, who owns the center with her husband, said they worked overnight Sunday, desperately trying to get water out of the building. They borrowed heaters and dehumidifiers to dry everything out, she said.

The center serves 30 to 40 kids, and was set to reopen Tuesday, Cruz said. It had flooded before, and they had prepared for another inundation by installing vinyl flooring, she said.

“That’s why this flood, this landslide, didn’t affect us,” she said.

Farther along the Third Avenue Bypass sits Ketchikan Public Library, perched over a picturesque valley. A short distance away, another, smaller landslide was reported Sunday. Earth and trees slid down a hillside, but the immediate area is not populated and it was of less concern.

“The water runoff is crystal clear, which is a good sign,” said Rydeen. “That means it’s down to bedrock.”

The storm that hit Ketchikan on Sunday wasn’t particularly strong, but it did follow an unusual dry spell for a city famed for its heavy rainfall. A state geologist said Monday that it was too early to say whether that triggered the slide.

[Timeline: A decade of deadly and destructive Alaska landslides]

In recent years, deadly landslides have struck other Southeast Alaska cities such as Haines and Wrangell. Still, Sunday’s slide shocked many in Ketchikan. Rydeen and Dial have both lived in Ketchikan for decades and neither could remember a landslide like the one that struck Sunday. For both men, the devastation was ominous.

“The troubling thing was, it wasn’t a bad storm. It wasn’t a bad rainfall. And we got two slides out of it, right? So I hope that’s not a predictor for what happens when we really get our big storms this fall,” Dial said.