Juneau Assembly approves emergency funds for flood recovery, lays out plans to investigate flood mitigation

On Monday evening, Juneau Assembly unanimously passed an emergency resolution, freeing up more than a million dollars of city funding for more flood response and recovery after the record-breaking glacial outburst flood earlier this month.

Most of the money will go toward debris removal, as well as repairs to the Mendenhall Wastewater Treatment Plant and the city stormwater system, but $150,000 will go toward studying ways to prevent catastrophic flooding in the future.

Juneau resident Elizabeth Figus said her home on View Drive has flooded two years in a row. She testified at Monday’s meeting, and said she’s frustrated that the city didn’t do more after last year’s devastating flood. 

“I did witness the city and all of you on the Assembly do a lot of hand waving and make a series of statements on the record that mitigation would be too expensive or too difficult,” she said. “So I’m very heartened to hear that some real motion is hopefully taking place.”

During the meeting, deputy City Manager Robert Barr laid out some ideas for flood mitigation.

A couple suggest tackling the problem at its source. A little more than a decade ago, the rapid retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier due to human-caused climate caused one portion of the glacier break off and recede, which revealed a rocky depression known as Suicide Basin or K’óox Ḵaadí Basin. Dammed by the remaining terminus of the Mendenhall Glacier,  the basin fills with rain and meltwater each year until it drains, causing flooding downstream in the Mendenhall River.

By creating a bore hole through the mountains, it may be possible to proactively drain water into Nugget Creek. It was also suggested that the basin could be filled in with rock, so that it would not collect water in the first place.

Barr said other ideas include modifying Mendenhall Lake. Draining some of the existing lakewater could potentially make room for the basin drainage next year, or some combination of dikes, dredging and pumping could control and slow the flow of water as it moves from the lake to the river.

Another possibility is to dredge new channels for the Mendenhall River, to allow water from Suicide Basin to drain to the ocean more quickly than it does right now.

None of these options have been studied extensively, and all come with major technical, financial and legal challenges. Both the basin and the lake are on U.S. Forest Service land, so any modifications to them would be subject to federal permitting processes. And all of these options would have multi-million-dollar budgets which would likely require federal funding to cover. Barr said that federal projects like this usually take years.

“If we want to see measurable action, something that works towards the goal of prevention and mitigation by next year, that is something that can only be done via political mandate,  really at the congressional, federal level,” he said.

Though an act of Congress is possible, it is unlikely, and it would require unprecedented political pressure from the Alaska delegation. Barr said any mitigation that the City and Borough of Juneau does pursue could be a liability.

“When we change something in the natural environment, whether it has to do with flooding or landslides or other natural disasters or potential natural disasters, we have to struggle with that challenge, ” he said. “When we change something, we may be liable for the potential negative impacts of that thing that we changed and the potential unintended consequences” he said.

Assembly member Christine Woll expressed doubt that the city could pull any mitigation project before that happens, or before flooding happens again.

“I just worry that we are setting false expectations for our community members who are going to have to be making decisions soon about what to do about their properties,” she said. “I’d like to be proven wrong that there’s a solution out there, but my gut tells me there isn’t, on any timeline before the system changes completely.”

As the Mendenhall Glacier continues to recede and thin, the ice dam on Suicide Basin will eventually disappear, though it will take decades. But scientists say there is another spot, further up the Mendenhall Glacier, where a glacial lake could form in the future and create a whole new source of flooding. 

In a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday, the City and Borough of Juneau and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska proposed a working group made up of local experts, Federal agencies and members of the Alaska delegation, to continue investigating possible mitigation measures.