Almost six years after a landslide killed two people in Haines, Alaska, the town still bears a scar of flattened trees.
“Even though I was here when all this happened, seeing this scar really startles me,” said Patty Brown, a volunteer EMT.
It rained leading up to the afternoon in December 2020 when a half mile of mountainside on Beach Road collapsed, washing away four homes in a torrent of rock and mud.
A voice came on Brown’s emergency radio.
“She said, ‘I’m trying to reach the fire department. The house next to me just disappeared,’” Brown said. “And it was just like, ‘What did she just say?’”
The landslide claimed the lives of two people, Jenae Larson and David Simmons. It was a major blow to Haines, a borough of about 2,000 people. One of Brown’s fellow EMTs died a week later as recovery efforts were underway— “of a broken heart,” she said.
Brown was elected to the Haines Borough Planning Commission in 2023. She said communities developing the steep, soggy slopes of Southeast Alaska need to be prepared for future disasters.
“Rainfall varies widely over the town area, and there are not gauges in all areas of town. I hope we add some this year,” she said. “But gravity and topography, that’s not changing.”
Across Southeast Alaska, landslides have killed at least a dozen people since August 2015. Similar tragedies have occurred in Sitka, Wrangell and Ketchikan, leaving people wondering who’s next.
That question has become even more urgent after last month, when a melting glacier in Nepal triggered an avalanche of ice and rock, killing more than a thousand people. By softening soil and inundating slopes, climate change is ratcheting up the risk in Alaska, too.
The eternal village
Landslides occur in all 50 states and cause billions of dollars of property damage every year.
In Southeast Alaska, “you can’t escape them. They’re everywhere,” said geologist Josh Roering of the University of Oregon.
Roering said there are many flavors of “debris flows,” — geologist-speak for cascades of water, soil and rock — but there are some common ingredients.
“Alaska has abundant slides due to steep slopes, direct exposure to storms that bring big rain and wind as well as rain-on-snow. Climate change results in these storms carrying more moisture,” he said. “Also, thawing permafrost contributes to weakening of bedrock and higher rates of landsliding.”
Permafrost is like underground glue holding together the bedrock. When it melts, mountains start to crumble.
In his quest to reverse engineer the recipe for deadly landslides, Roering has brought a team of researchers to a rugged mountainside about 20 miles outside of Haines, up the Chilkat River Valley.
The scientists scramble up a slope of loose rocks strewn with trees uprooted by past debris flows.
Third-year PhD student Ries Plescher checks up on a seismometer the team has buried in the woods.
“It measures ground vibrations. So, it feels when the earth is shaking,” he said. “Hypothetically, you could hook this into a cellular system. We could say, ‘Here’s a debris flow coming down.’ You might have like three to five minutes to get out of your home.”
That kind of early-warning system is “a long-term aspiration,” Roering said, but scientists can study conditions that caused landslides in the past and issue general warnings based on weather forecasts.
Early warning is something the people of Klukwan would love to have. Their village of fewer than 100 people has been dealing with landslides for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
The town’s name Tlákw Aan means “eternal village,” and it sits on an alluvial fan, where debris rolls off the Takshanuk Mountains over the banks of the salmon-rich Chilkat River.
The land itself is the product of landslides eons ago, said tribal council member Noowkakáawu.
“The elders said that there was a prophecy that the mountain was going to come down altogether, and that’ll be the end of Klukwan,” he said.
Tlingit legend also tells of another village nearby named “earth slid over it” that was washed away. So far, the people of Klukwan have avoided that fate.
“I think if we have it in our power to try to make a change so we can protect our home, that’s what we’re always going to do,” said Noowkakáawu. “No matter what front it comes from.”
Tribal member Shawna Hotch said one of her earliest memories is of her family digging silt out from under their house after a mudslide. The tribal government of Chilkat Indian Village wants to build more housing, but Hotch said the growing risk of landslides is complicating that development.
Things are different now than when this village was founded long ago, Hotch said.
“We used to be able to move freely. So, when a disaster would happen or when the seasons would change, we could move. Now we’re stuck here,” she said. “I love this land, and I love this place, and we don’t have that flexibility anymore. We can’t move the whole town just because the river’s eroding year by year and the avalanches keep coming.”
Instead, Hotch said the village needs to “build our climate resilience.” They wrote a resilience plan, built a new weather station, and joined The Ḵutí Geohazards Project, a regional collaboration studying natural disasters. Next, she wants to set up an Incident Command System, a formal center for emergency management.
In the meantime, she and Noowkakáawu said they’re living with a healthy respect for the yakgwahéiyagu, the spirit in the mountains.
“I think we’re just meant to be here. Jilkaat Kwaan is our traditional territory, but it’s also what we call ourselves. There’s no separation from people and place to us. Our identity is deeply tied to the lands that we steward,” Hotch said. “We’re supposed to be here.”
Managing risk
The people of Klukwan cannot be separated from their land, but landslides have been known to cut off the town from the rest of Haines Borough.
The government has spent tens of millions of dollars rebuilding and improving the only road connecting Klukwan to the rest of the valley. In an attempt to redirect flows of rock and mud that have repeatedly washed it out, construction crews are raising the road and installing 24-foot-wide culverts to convey debris safely underneath.
Matt Boron, a maintenance and operations foreman with the state Department of Transportation in Haines, said those debris flows are a constant concern.
“It’s an ongoing maintenance issue to make them do what we want to do,” Boron said. “You’re dealing with Mother Nature, right? So even sometimes your best intentions don’t do anything.”
Homeowners who have had their property damaged by landslides are also at the mercy of nature. Standard homeowners insurance does not cover damage from landslides, and neither does the National Flood Insurance Program.
Standalone landslide insurance is exceedingly rare, but Pennsylvania is on the cusp of establishing a first-of-its-kind Landslide and Sinkhole Insurance Fund run by the state.
In Alaska, cities including Haines and the capital Juneau have drawn up maps showing which areas are at higher risk–but stopped short of formally adopting them, after residents raised concerns about property values.
Juneau has not had a deadly landslide since 1936, but recent disasters in Alaska’s capital have destroyed homes.
In 2022, heavy rain pushed a house on Gastineau Avenue off its foundation and sent it careening into the house next door. Four years later, there’s still a gash in the misty treeline where downtown Juneau meets the mountainside, uphill from an empty lot and a boarded-up home.
In this environment, the risk of landslides is obvious. But developing a better warning system will take time, said Aaron Jacobs, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau.
“Other places across the world have done much better because they have the data,” he said. “There’s a lot of anxiety, especially when you hear a lot of heavy rain coming down on your roof and you wonder like, ‘is it safe for me to be here? Is it safe for my kid to go to school?’ So, we’re trying as fast as possible to get these answers to improve the science so we can improve the safety of our residents of southeast Alaska.”
Landslides are a threat for the more than 1 million people who visit Alaska by cruise ship every year, too. Last year, a mountainside collapsed in the Tracy Arm fjord, triggering one of the largest tsunamis on record. No one was killed, but if the landslide had happened a few hours later when boats and cruise ships were more likely to be in the area, landslide experts said it could have been catastrophic.
In Haines, the mountainside scar is a painful reminder of the landslide in 2020 that killed Jenae Larson and David Simmons. It’s impossible to miss from a park across the bay, looming behind a sign welcoming people to town.
Lilianna Benassi takes in the sight, standing by benches dedicated to the victims and a table carved with the words “Haines Stay Strong.”
Six years ago, she lived on the street where the landslide happened. That day, she had just parked her truck when she said everything started shaking.
“I look behind me, and all I can see is boulders the size of the house and trees 50 feet tall going down towards the water,” she said.
Some of those trees pinned her truck to the side of the road, but she survived. Hanging from Benassi’s rearview mirror was a crystal necklace she made after the death of her brother Mario two years earlier. That day, she said, he was her guardian angel.
“Every time I pass by that scar, I think about him, and I think about David, and I think about Jenae and just think about how precious life is,” she said.
Benassi avoided that part of town for a long time. Now she visits the trailhead at the end of Beach Road and hikes down to the water at Battery Point. The route takes her right past the scene of the destruction.
“It is really hard to see,” she said, “but I also do love that there are plants growing. Hopefully there’s some blueberries up there, and some raspberries, and there’s some really pretty flowers growing up there. It’s a very bittersweet kind of moment, because the Earth could just swallow us whole.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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