Juneau has now experienced record-breaking glacial outburst flooding events two years in a row. What role should the city play in mitigating damage to residential property in the future?

Dorene Lorenz

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

When it comes to flooding, if it happens once, it’ll never happen again. If it happens two years in a row, good luck. Next year, it’s only going to get worse. The city obviously needs to be upfront and trying to figure out how to mitigate the damages from this glacial dam outburst. And there are a lot of different ways to do that. We are not the first community having to face this sort of adventure. The city definitely needs to take care of it as quickly and expeditiously as possible, getting federal and state resources to assist us and to ask. So that we don’t end up losing the entire property in the Valley along that river, because as it floods year after year, you’re going to see more and more properties affected as it goes past places that normally have been fortified.

Emily Mesch

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

The primary role, I think, is figuring out restitution for the people damaged by this year’s flood. I think finding grant money, finding support, getting more construction workers into town to make sure that the homes are complete before the winter comes in as much as possible.

And I think that goes on into next year. Any mitigation we can do that’s on city land should be done. Any effort to push the federal government and state government where it’s relevant to. I don’t even care what the plan is, as long as there is a plan in place by – I was going to say this time next year – but earlier than that. June of next year, physically to stop a flood, whether that is drilling through the mountain, whether it’s putting a giant dam around Mendenhall Lake – whatever the people above my pay grade decide is the right thing to do. The city needs to be pushing them as hard as possible to make sure it happens.

Nano Brooks

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

Well, it goes even beyond residential property. That also plays directly into the health and safety of the members of the community and the people of this community come first and foremost. And this issue now being a reoccurring disaster that’s affecting hundreds of homes and people needs to be one of the highest, if not the highest, priority of the Assembly right now to address the issues and do whatever they can to put into place mitigating factors and programs.

You know the easiest thing to do right now is a basic alert system and evacuation program. The second thing to do is that you can build levees or dams to divert the water when we do have the next potential overflow or outburst. And that’s going to take coordination with the Forest Service and the state as well.

Mary Marks

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

Well, it’s my understanding that the Assembly was informed last year that there was a possibility of this happening again, and what happened? It was very severe, and a lot of our families in our neighborhoods suffered because of that. And we’re not always guaranteed that our home insurance are going to meet those needs, and because of the different guidelines of each home insurance is going to be different. Some get a yahoo, some are like, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?” So it’s tight. And I really believe that this should be a lesson to our Assembly, as well as the administration that we need to act here and really pay close attention if we don’t know what we’re up against. It’s important to ask those questions and not be afraid to ask the questions and allow the community to be a part of that solution, working together.

Maureen Hall

Candidate for District 2 Assembly

I absolutely feel like the city should play a key role in coming up with the solution for this annual outburst. I do feel that a solution up at Suicide Basin is unrealistic, as the [Mendenhall] glacier is such a dynamic, constantly changing. So where the flood is occurring now might not be where it’s occurring in a couple of years time. Same regarding levees around the lake, the whole environmental process of getting it permitted would be years in the making. I do think the river, there’s city land right there, so it would be a much cleaner process to make some modifications to the river to help prevent future flooding, or be able to absorb the water that is coming down the river.

Neil Steininger

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

I actually have some pretty first-hand experience with this. My parents live on Meander Way. They’ve been pretty lucky in the fact that the damage to their home is very minimal. But looking at that problem, it’s definitely something the city needs to be involved in.

We have a housing crisis already. Taking 300 houses off the market effectively – if nothing is done about this issue – really, we can’t handle that within the market of housing. I think there are a lot of interesting concepts and ideas to mitigate the damage. Some of them are on city land and so, of course, the city would be the prime entity working on those projects. But I think at the end of the day, it’s going to be a partnership between the city, the feds and the state. 

Connor Ulmer

Candidate for District 1 Assembly

I think one of the main things that the city should look at is developing more of their emergency response to natural disasters. I believe there’s mainly just kind of one guy who’s there doing it, but it’s kind of like it’s not his full-time job, so it’s a little funky. So I think it would be really important to make sure that there’s somebody who’s at least one person’s full-time job of making sure that the city is ready to respond to any of those disasters, like the flooding and more of the landslides that we’ve been seeing in our community. And I also think just making sure that the city stays up to date on the potential maps of where there could be landslides, the potential of flooding in the future, and how large of floods it could be.

Beth Weldon

Candidate for Mayor

So we’re working currently, right now, on building a working group with Army Corps of Engineers, DOT [Department of Transportation & Public Facilities], NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] and the federal delegation. In fact, City Manager [Katie] Koester, Mr. [Robert] Barr are going up on Sept. 6 for this first greeting, along with two of the tribal members. Just start the first conversations with the Army Corps of Engineers and say, ‘What can we do short term? What can we do long term? How much support can we have?’

The other thing that we just talked about is using some money that we had set aside for another position between the school district and the city to maybe have a project engineer to be able to help with these positions. 

Angela Rodell

Candidate for Mayor

The city needs to be at the lead, at the forefront of driving a comprehensive solution for Mendenhall Valley, taking into account all the different constituencies and ownership structures that exist out there – whether it’s the federal government, state government, the city; the city owns land along the river – and really driving the discussion, allowing people to find ways to offer their expertise.

We have a number of mining engineers, geologists, hydrologists, finance people, and really tapping into the community to allow comprehensive solutions. When we allow piecemeal solutions, I think we’re going to continue to get what we’ve gotten. So I completely support and understand why homeowners were allowed to riprap part of their riverfront property, but it’s like putting rubber bands around a water balloon and you’re just moving the river somewhere else. And so having that comprehensive solution — Juneau needs to drive that discussion; the city needs to lead on that discussion.