Tlingit legend tells of a landslide at Chilkoot Lake so large that the resulting shock wave washed parts of the historic village there into Lutak Inlet.
In the late 1880s, a chunk of mountainside adjacent to the Chilkoot River “eye” collapsed, destroying an estimated 30 village structures and claiming several lives.
A few years after George Shotridge started building of a new Whale House in Klukwan in1899, villagers rescued its treasured artifacts from a mudslide that destroyed the building before completion. The existing Whale House was built of cement in the 1930s – making it perhaps the valley’s stoutest structure – to protect the “objects of everlasting esteem” from slides.
A few years after mud claimed Shotridge’s “new” Whale House, a giant landslide near 19 Mile pushed the Tlingit village of Kaatx’waaltu (Kluctoo) into the Chilkat River.
In the 1970s and 1980s, landslides in the neighborhood across Lutak Bridge destroyed structures owned by Ray Carder and Ray Cockerille. Cockerille and Sharon Resnick escaped their home with little time to spare.
On Nov. 23, 2005, a Thanksgiving storm unleashed so much rain on Haines that sections of Mud Bay and Lutak roads simply washed into adjoining bays. A bartender who drove into a waist-high mudslide near 20 Mile Haines Highway was rescued by Klukwan villagers who pulled her to safety with a rope. Disaster funding paid for tens of millions of dollars of road reconstruction.
In January 2012, rain that fell on record snowfall loosened a giant lens of land on the Young Road hillside, pushing it a few inches toward Lynn Canal. The so-called “slump” fractured Lutak Road, broke a sewer line, forced relocation of utilities, undermined a home and killed prospects for a subdivision planned at the end of Barnett Road.
The mountains are falling down around us, as they always have. It’s the nature of mountains. They are leveled, over time, by many raindrops. At a cabin I own adjacent to a cliff, I listen to rocks and occasionally trees tumble down during heavy fall rains.
The problem isn’t floods and landslides. They are as much a part of the Chilkat Valley as salmon. The problem is we tend to regard each slide and each storm as an isolated event, unconnected to others, and not part of a historical pattern or a future one.
Engineers hired by the Haines Borough to explain what happened during the “slump” recommended $1.2 million in work on drainages in the Young Road area, where land was cleared and subdivided with little regard to downhill effects. Besides removing trees that anchor soil, developers funneled runoff into a few drainages, increasing the potential for flooding, they said. The hillside there will keep sliding, they said.
The engineers’ recommendations were never pursued.
Longtime Haines Borough Planning Commission chair Lee Heinmiller told me that except for when issuing a conditional use permit to expand the Turner pit on the Ripinsky hillside above Allen Road, the commission has never required an engineer’s review of slope stability before approving a development.
Some language in Haines Borough Code prohibits development that will impact neighboring landowners but “nobody makes guarantees about what the stability of anything is,” Heinmiller told me. And there are no requirements for approval of development or even review by soil or water scientists, he said.
In light of historic slides and in the wake of this week’s fatal one at Beach Road subdivision, the Haines Borough’s review and approval process for local development – particularly on steep, wooded hillsides – appears lax, at best.
But here’s the rub: Scientists tell us that the upshot of climate change is we’ll get pretty much the same weather, but with more extremes. Consider that 30 feet of snow that fell during the winter of 2011-2012 made it the snowiest on record, and that the past summer – June through August – was the wettest ever.
As precipitation is what triggers landslides, should we not expect record precipitation to set off record slides?
A thinking person might think we need to start thinking about that, and how to change our behavior as a community, accordingly.