A southeast Alaska community wrestles with a deadly landslide's impact

Jamie Roberts and her husband felt lucky when they found an A-frame cabin on forest-draped Wrangell Island in southeast Alaska, where they could settle on a few acres and have some chickens.

A stretch of highway a few miles north, the only road into town, did make her nervous; there, waterfalls cascaded and rocks tumbled from towering bluffs on stormy days. But she always felt safe at her home of more than 20 years.

That all changed the night of Nov. 20 after heavy rains, when a torrent of earth and trees rushed down a mountainside next to their home, cutting a swath to the sea. It killed six people, including a family of five; demolished two houses; and buried the highway.

The landslide lacked the scale of one that erased a neighborhood in Oso, Washington, 10 years ago this Friday. But it, too, left a community unmoored, wondering whether the dramatic landscape above was as permanent as it once seemed.

Roberts and her family have moved from their home and only returned for brief visits.

"I don't know that we'd ever sleep very well going back there," she said.

In some ways, life in Wrangell, a former logging town, is returning to normal. The summer tourism and seafood processing seasons are approaching, and the boys' varsity basketball team this month competed at state. The highway has been rebuilt.

But trees and other debris still dotted the tidelands and lower portions of the snow-covered scar on a recent day.

That scar is visible from the driveway of Stephen Todd's waterfront home. Todd, his wife and their dog, Festus, moved back last month after staying closer to town after the slide.

"There were no signs of instability" on that slope before, said Todd, a biologist. "I mean, it's steep country, but every place is steep country in southeast Alaska." He and his wife won't stay in their home when the forecast calls for intense rain.

Rain is a part of life in the region, most of which is nestled in the Tongass National Forest, a temperate rainforest. Communities have long co-existed with landslide risks: In Alaska's capital, Juneau, the downtown core and tourist district are built into or are at the base of mountains. Thousands of landslides have been documented in the Tongass, though relatively few have been fatal. 

But as the climate continues to warm, intense rains are expected to become more frequent in the region and other parts of the West Coast, heightening landslide risk. Researchers have blamed atmospheric rivers for landslides in southeast Alaska that killed three people in Sitka in 2015 and two in Haines in 2020.

After the Wrangell landslide, the state set up a drone operation and weather instruments on Roberts' property to help officials identify warning signs. A second weather station is planned for the ridgeline above.

State and federal agencies hope to see more high-elevation weather stations installed in the region. The National Weather Service would like to use soil analyses from geologists to better understand how much rain it takes to increase a community's landslide risk and incorporate that into weather alerts, said senior hydrologist Aaron Jacobs. But the work is intensive, and pulling it together will likely take years.