Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Make ’em be hydrologists and geotechnical engineers and such.
That’s where the money will be. Those will be among the best-paying jobs in Southeast Alaska, where the rains are bringing down our mountainsides – and the homes, driveways and roads located on them – faster than ever.
Since 2015, landslides have killed 12 Southeast residents. Several slides as big or bigger than the fatal ones in Sitka, Haines, Wrangell and Ketchikan have been recorded at Panhandle locations out of harm’s way.
For years, fatal landslides only happened in places like Bangladesh. Now they’re here.
Considering that climate change models predict continued extreme weather events, it seems likely that besides claiming lives and wreaking destruction, floods and landslides will bust a hole in historic construction methods on view properties, causing unknowable effects on property values and the property market.
Ripple or wave effects will wash over into to the Haines economy. Lumberyards, contractors and construction companies may make new money on stouter homes built with retaining walls, bigger drainages and such.
As a result, homebuilding may become more expensive, putting new housing farther out of reach of residents with moderate or low incomes.
Just last week two constituents chatted me up about disputes they were having with neighbors over drainage issues. In our neighborhoods, we are already making guesses about runoff, building more and bigger ditches and arguing where the water should run.
We won’t stop building view homes in Haines. Houses perched on the cliffs of Malibu and on sandbars at the Outer Banks testify that nothing will stop us from building homes in dangerous spots. People will never surrender the promise of an ocean view.
So what can we do? The State of Alaska two years ago dedicated a new office to address landslides. Two representatives of the office visited town Thursday and held rapt a crowd of about 40 citizens, including many members of the borough’s planning commission.
Unfortunately, they reported that even with LIDAR, a technology that sees the subsurface structure of our mountains, predicting the likelihood of a slide will be very difficult. Besides the underground photos, geotechnical engineers will need to dig into soil, set gauges and examine specific sites for slide susceptibility.
The planning commission, which organized and sponsored Thursday’s event, will inherit the difficult task of determining acceptable flooding and landslide risks when it puts its stamp of approval on new subdivisions. The recent rejection of a proposed gravel pit near the ferry terminal came down to concern about terrain there that often slides.
The town’s robust building and construction trades and a housing shortage will amount to pressure the commission will face to permit new construction at the lowest development cost. They’ll need some backbone to prevent the mistakes made in subdivisions off Young Road.
Undersized ditching and culverting there, along with blockage of historic drainages, led the mountain to “slump” in 2012 and for lower Young Road to wash away entirely in 2020.
Hydrologic engineers in 2012 told the borough to spend $1.2 million restoring natural drainages there to end the funneling of runoff that turns Young Road ditches into a gullet. The borough still hasn’t done that work.
Crumbling mountains and downhill flooding don’t respect governments, studies or property lines. In the end, professionals who understand how water and mountains move will be in the highest demand.