There’s an apocryphal story about Ben Franklin, arguably the most pragmatic leader in colonial America, and a disastrous shipwreck.
The wreck claimed the lives of many of the passengers aboard and distraught mourners asked that a chapel be built on the site in remembrance. When the question was put to Franklin he said, “No, build a lighthouse.”
We are surrounded by more snow that was on the ground one year ago when torrential rains on a heavy snow load caused a natural disaster that claimed two lives. If the rains started again, would we be any more prepared than a year ago?
The question is not academic. Flooding cost the town millions of dollars in 2005 and again in 2012, when the town-side flank of Mount Ripinsky buckled during a rain-on-snow storm similar to last December’s.
Engineers in 2013 recommended the Haines Borough spend at least $1.6 million re-evaluating the entire Young Road hillside drainage, including the Highland Estates and Skyline subdivisions. Part of the problem, the engineers said, was that too many of the hillside’s natural drainages had been funneled down onto Young Road, too many trees had been cut down, too much of the topography had been altered without forethought.
So far the borough has put bigger culverts along Young Road.
This winter’s big weather story isn’t snow but the reason for the snow: Below-freezing temperatures that have lasted for most of the past month. That’s rare.
What happens if they continue? Are our water and sewer lines deep enough to withstand an unprecedented duration of frigid temperatures? Will we all be buying block heaters for our cars? If long, deep freezes become more regular, should we start building our homes differently? And if those long, deep freezes start to be followed by longer rains and thaws, will we need a new system of drainage ditches and culverts to accommodate the new extremes?
These questions are not academic. We know this from observing the world around us: Weather extremes are becoming more dramatic. Scientists for years said that climate change would bring more extreme weather. In a special bulletin in August, a U.N. panel said the devastating effects of climate change were coming sooner than their models had projected.
For Haines, that’s not just rain and snow.
According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, the winter of 2017-18 was the driest in Southeast Alaska in 40 years. Fish hatcheries and aquatic life suffered. Hydro dams dried up. The dry continued into the summer of 2019, the first extreme drought ever recorded in Southeast.
Then came the summer of 2020, the wettest on record in Southeast, and a few months later, the Haines landslides.
Our summer and winter weather are becoming more extreme. Those changes will change the way we work, play and live, how we build our houses, how we manage our resources, what resources disappear and which will endure.
Either way, the changes are going to cost us a lot of money, from different clothing to changes in our homes and public buildings to damage mitigation. Politicians aren’t onto this yet for several reasons, including that rebuilding a natural drainage is expensive and not as sexy as building another dock.
But making drainages work and preparing for weather extremes is likely a better long-term investment for saving us money and sparing us heartbreak.