As Juneau residents dry out from the flood, some wonder which repairs are worth it

Sam and Amanda Hatch can’t reach the knob on their front door. It’s suspended in mid-air, along with the rest of their home, which towers above the others on Meander Way.

During last year’s glacial outburst flood, water filled the Hatch’s crawl space and saturated the silty land beneath their house until it was wiggly, like quick sand. The whole building sank back towards the river. The four corners drooped and the foundation folded down the middle.

“Our house is really screwed up,” Sam Hatch said. “We made this decision like ‘Okay, either we intervene now or we wait for the house to break and walk away.’”

Their frankensteined house is that intervention. The original building, with its light green siding, now sits four feet off the ground, vaulted on sheets of plywood. Beneath that, there’s a brand new foundation. The garage has not been rebuilt yet, and in the front yar, there’s some unused construction material, leftover from when they ran out of money to finish the job.

The Hatches sent their contractors away in June. Then — in August — the work they managed to finish was put to the test with the arrival of another record-breaking glacial outburst flood.

The high water threatened to breach Hatch’s house, even after it had been lifted, but they managed to stay dry while hundreds of others in the Mendenhall Valley took on water.

With the promise of more glacial outburst floods to come, Sam Hatch says he’s heard lots of people wondering about how they should fix up their homes, grappling with the same uncertainty he faced last year.

“It’s like what do I do? Do I just put it back the way that it was?” he said. “If we know the flood hazards, then people want to prepare for them. They can either harden structures, or mitigate or get away from the problem.”

It’s hard for homeowners to figure out what will make these annual floods tolerable. Staying completely dry might be difficult, if not impossible, but it’s also hard to make peace with letting the water in again and again. Both options are expensive.

“And you have to decide, is it worth selling? Is it worth walking away? Or is it worth paying to repair,” Amanda Hatch said.

The Hatches decided to lift their house, after consulting with a neighbor on View Drive who had done it after his house was damaged by a glacial outburst flood in 2015. Few contractors in the state do that kind of work. The Hatches had to fly someone in from out of town.

At first, they say, there was a small group of neighbors who were interested in lifting their houses too. That would have brought down the cost of the labor and materials, but in the end most people backed out. So the Hatches decided to go it alone.

They were able to get a small grant from state disaster assistance to fill in the land that the flood scoured from beneath their house. But they had to take out loans and open up their retirement account to scrape together the rest of the money they needed — $100,000 to fix the foundation, then another $150,000 for the lift.

Compromising a dream home

Lisa Wallace, who lives a few blocks over on Emily Way, said she doesn’t have that kind of money. The bottom floor of her two-story house filled with two feet of water this year, even though it had never flooded before.

“To have this place that has been my safety and my security for all these years and now be told you’re going to get a 500-year-flood every year. It sucks,” Wallace said.

She says this place was her dream home, with a freshly remodeled kitchen that’s now completely gutted and a cozy living room that’s empty now, except for the dining room table and a couple foldable camping chairs. The place is drying out with box fans, and the exposed subfloor is still dusted in glacial silt.

Wallace knows it could flood again, so she’s making plans to live with the water. She’s been researching construction materials that are used in the Southeast U.S., where things like hurricanes and sea level rise driven by human-caused climate change cause frequent floods.

She said she’ll outfit her first floor with special waterproof drywall and vinyl flooring to replace the hardwood, so it will be easier to dry out next year. A lot of the things she loved about this place will not be replaced.

“Why the heck would I buy new furniture? Why would I put beautiful flooring down? Why would I do that,” she said. “I had my perfect home, and it isn’t perfect anymory. But I’m certainly not doing any of that until we find out how the next flood goes.”

Wallace had plans to move somewhere smaller in her retirement, which is fast approaching. But she says the investment she’s making to repair this house will make affording a new place challenging.

“I wouldn’t buy here again”

Most people who flooded this year, including Wallace, never paid much attention to the glacial outburst floods before. But Nico Bus did, because the Mendenhall River runs right through his backyard on Meander Way. His efforts for flood mitigation have been both a success story and a cautionary tale.

Even before the annual floods began, the river had been eroding his property — and that of his neighbors — for years. Back in 1996, Bus made an investment of $25,000 to protect his home by armoring the riverbank with rock.

When the glacial outburst floods started, they accelerated the erosion, and back in 2018 Bus even campaigned to get the entire neighborhood to split the cost of a retention wall to stop it. At the time, many of his neighbors felt the costs were too high, and the risks were too low.

That is, until last year’s catastrophic flood, which ate away at the riverbank so quickly that it undermined foundations and caused two houses to collapse into the river. Bus made it out unscathed that time.

“Clearly, it was a smart move to reinforce the bank,” Bus said. “But I don’t think the riprap, as you call it, was designed to help with this high of water.”

The nature of the flooding continues to evolve. This year, the reinforced banks held again, but it didn’t matter. The water spilled over them and surged into Bus’ home from multiple directions, as it never had before.

Bus said he and his wife love their home, but he feels it isn’t worth the money it will take to protect it.

“I wouldn’t buy here again. We have been lucky to live here for 39 years,” he said. “We’re going to give it another year, but if it floods again I’d be silly to stay here.”

As much as they’re grateful for their homes, some also feel stuck with them after the flood. In the end, the Hatches did get some financial help via a loan from the U.S. Small Business Association, which they applied for last year.  Ironically, that money finally came in on the day of this year’s flood. They say it will help them to pay back the higher interest loans they took out, but they won’t recover any of the personal savings they spent.

“That’s just gone.,” Sam Hatch said. “It’s in the house now. Yay! That’s one form of investment.”

For the Hatches, the investment to protect their house makes sense. Juneau has an enduring shortage of housing, and the homes that are available are extremely expensive. Amanda Hatch said they worried they’d have nowhere else to go, and they don’t want to leave this community.

“Is it worth it? Are we glad we did it? Absolutely, cause I think the house would have been a loss,” she said. “Juneau can’t absorb a family of five, let alone 300 houses worth of families.”

But she says there was no joy in being spared this year, while they watched their neighbors flood.