As flood recovery begins, View Drive residents say misinformation from city leaves them hung out to dry
- Jasz Garrett
- Aug 17
- 12 min read
Updated: Aug 19
‘Harrowing experience’ for those left to fend for themselves in the 2025 glacial lake outburst flood
By Jasz Garrett and Natalie Buttner
Juneau Independent
The city has congratulated itself on a new communications partnership approach for this year’s flood, but View Drive residents say a fog of misinformation is clouding their ability to take mitigation into their own hands.
At a press briefing on Friday, Mayor Beth Weldon said there was “a lot of relief” after the Mendenhall River’s crest on Wednesday. This year, the City and Borough of Juneau partnered with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities to launch a joint communication strategy in coordination with additional state and federal agencies.
“Instead of people depressed, sad, bringing refuge to the roadside, you saw people mowing their lawn, walking their dog, kids playing – there was even a few kids playing in the puddles that were left over,” she said. “So what a difference a year makes.”
But for a neighborhood not protected by HESCO barriers, a year of advocacy left them flooded all the same.
The semipermanent levee installed earlier this year by CBJ minimized or prevented damage to most Mendenhall Valley homes at risk of flooding. If the levee cannot be installed for View Drive, a buyout program may be the neighborhood's only option for mitigation.
A preliminary assessment by the city found five of the six homes suffering major flood damage were located on View Drive.
On Friday, View Drive flood victims were in their third day without phone service or internet after a power line near the Back Loop Bridge was damaged in the disaster.
At a special Juneau Assembly meeting Friday, City Manager Katie Koester thanked the Assembly for supporting the communications during the flood.
“Our communications has really been phenomenal on this event,” she said.
Elizabeth Figus said she reached out to the city on Friday about the communication services disruption and was told CBJ is unable to provide support.
“While we have some mobile internet capacity for internal CBJ operations, we’re not equipped to provide that for individuals in their homes or neighborhoods, and we rely on private companies like AT&T, GCI, and ACS for those services in our community,” Deputy City Manager Robert Barr told the Juneau Independent.
Figus said the lack of backup communication options feels like a summary of the city's flood responses for View Drive.
“I’m sure they had great communication among their staff, but there were only six homes with major damage this year, five of which were on View Drive,” she said. “I haven’t seen any of these people.”
She and her partner, Malachi Thorington, have pushed for View Drive mitigation at city meetings since 2023.
Like many in the neighborhood, Thorington never expected to be impacted by a glacial lake outburst flood when he bought his house in 2017.
Thorington and Figus evacuated on Tuesday to a friend’s house with their two cats. The couple said they chose to evacuate because of how unpredictable the flood can be. They said that since they have lived through the disaster twice, they now choose to keep half of their belongings in a storage unit year-round.
“The downstairs has been basically abandoned for the bottom four feet of it, so everything is at least two, three feet up off the ground, and we just kind of let the water come in and let the water go out,” Thorington said.
He said his neighbors have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on flood-fighting measures. Thorington looked into raising his home, but it would have cost a quarter of a million dollars.
The Mendenhall River crested at 16.65 feet on Wednesday morning. That afternoon, Figus received cleanup supplies from friends who live on Northland Street, an area that was protected by HESCOs.
“When they did not get any water, they just threw all their supplies in their truck and showed up here,” Figus said.
While she expressed her gratitude for friends who helped in the aftermath of the flood, she said she and other View Drive residents have not gotten the support they need from the city.
Protecting View Drive
CBJ’s Engineering and Public Works Department guided an initial installation and design of the existing HESCO barriers along the Mendenhall River, shielding other at-risk neighborhoods.
The initial assessment by the department determined HESCO installation in the area would be challenging, but Nate Rumsey, deputy director of engineering and public works, said Friday that it has not been completely ruled out.
City engineers determined through the initial assessment that the elevation and width required for an effective levee system would likely not be achievable on View Drive, Rumsey said in an interview on Friday.
He noted that the height of the HESCO barriers needed to protect certain sections of View Drive would concentrate a significant amount of weight in one area. Because View Drive is surrounded by water on three sides, Rumsey said he worries HESCO barriers in this area could function as a dam instead of a levee.
Rumsey also said an additional geotechnical study would be needed before the city could consider installing barriers along View Drive.
“If we wanted to do things like go out and perform more detailed geotechnical analysis to determine if those soils have the bearing capacity to determine what it would take from a regulatory requirement standpoint — I'm an engineer,” he said. “I think if given enough time and resources, we can do anything. But we don’t have infinite time. We don’t have infinite resources.”
Earlier this year, View Drive residents were told the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Emergency Management Program was involved in the decision-making process. The city's emergency program manager reiterated this again on July 29.
No formal study was conducted for View Drive mitigation, said Randy Bowker, deputy district engineer and chief of the Program and Projects Management Division for the Army Corps of Engineers Alaska District. He said the Corps of Engineers may have theoretically validated the initial assessment and or given technical advice.
When asked about the decision not to install HESCO barriers on View Drive, Bowker said it was not something the Corps of Engineers determined.
“That would have been the City and Borough determining what would be the best remedy for them,” he said Thursday. “We just provide the product in this case.”
At a June 2 Assembly Committee of the Whole worksession, City Manager Katie Koester said a principal engineer with the Corps of Engineers would conduct a feasibility study for HESCO barriers in the View Drive area.
“They were not able to do a full feasibility study,” she told the Independent after the 2025 flood. “They did look at it and determined that it would cost a lot of money and a lot of time to do that study because of a lot of the potential concerns on View Drive.”
Based on their conversations with city officials, residents of View Drive thought the Corps had conducted a feasibility study and that HESCO barriers were completely out of the question.
Thorington and Figus said the unclear communication from the city makes it challenging to consider expensive home renovations “on their own dime” or a buyout program. This year, their first floor took on a foot more of water than in 2024.
Last fall, Figus informally suggested CBJ initiate the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, which is intended to relieve imminent hazards to life and property caused by a natural disaster. In the case of View Drive, this program would finance 75% of a buyout.
After the Juneau Assembly on May 12 approved extending HESCO barriers to protect city and school properties, Figus formally asked Barr to initiate the protection program.
On May 23, CBJ and Tlingit and Haida asked the National Resources Conservation Service to initiate the watershed protection program.
NRCS State Conservation Engineer Brett Nelson visited the neighborhood in July, along with officials from CBJ and Tlingit and Haida.
Nelson said a damage survey report he is submitting is likely to recommend buyouts for the 20 View Drive homes. But if the neighborhood can be protected with HESCOs, there is no need for the buyout. He said that is up to the city and Corps of Engineers to determine.
City sponsorship of the buyout program has been tentatively included on the Sept. 8 Assembly meeting agenda, according to Ashley Heimbigner, public information officer for CBJ.
Many View Drive residents see selling their properties to the city as a last resort.
A cycle of damage
Angela Smith sat on her sunny upper porch on Tuesday while her next-door neighbors, Thorington and Figus, were packing up their truck. She thanked her neighbors for their advocacy to the city.
Smith and her husband have lived on View Drive for nearly 30 years, raising their six children in their house beside the Mendenhall River. Smith’s mother, who lives with them, evacuated on Tuesday afternoon.
Smith said the forecast of a record flood motivated them to add sandbags, raise furniture, and place the generator and boiler high on shelving in the garage. A raft sat in the driveway, which Smith said they would use to paddle to higher ground in an emergency.
“When it crests, let’s say the last three feet, that's the really harrowing experience,” she said.
In an interview on Tuesday, Smith said she would monitor the river’s forecasted crest time. In preparation for the outburst days before, her grandsons lined plastic and sandbags along the front door and sliding back glass door of their house. She hoped they would get lucky and water wouldn’t come through.
“I was way too optimistic,” Smith said Thursday, reflecting on her confidence in the flood mitigation measures she and her husband took after 2023.
On Thursday, a day after the record-breaking 16.65 crest, four of Smith’s grandchildren spread a pile of gravel across her driveway, warped by this year’s flood.
“It's amazing how much cleanup, even if you have this completely empty, because we have to move every bed and every little thing to be able to scrub and scrub and scrub,” Smith said. “It's not clean water. It's horrible.”
Though this is the first year Smith and her husband considered evacuating, they chose to stay to refill the generator that powered their water pumps, which required fuel every eight hours.
In preparation for the 2024 flood, she and her husband installed watertight vents and water pumps in their garage. After speaking with her brother in Florida, Smith also “hurricane-proofed” her house, adding a thick waterproof wrap and corrugated metal siding around the outside of her home.
“The first flood everything on the downstairs was destroyed from the water,” Smith said. “Everything had to be removed to the joists, including the bathrooms and everything. Last year, we avoided that with the vents and the pumps, and then we use a generator, because they turn our electricity off.”
Smith referred to 2023 as the first flood, but she and her husband experienced water in their garage years earlier.
Outbursts from Suicide Basin began in 2011. Smith said when the floods first began, the Mendenhall River submerged her backyard. Her grandchildren grew up playing and fishing in the water.
The first devastating flood was in 2023. Water spread through View Drive and eroded riverbanks downstream, causing a section of one home to fall into the river and undercutting the foundations of others.
“Until lately, it just wasn’t anything scary like that,” Smith said. “In 2016, it got in our garage. But we’re talking an inch or two. And even then, it's just the garage, because the house is built much higher than the garage.”
Smith said during the 2024 outburst flood, they were able to save the crawl space.
“We just got very, very lucky that it didn’t make it to our doors,” she said.
This year, they weren’t so lucky. More than five feet of water entered the garage, and six inches of water covered the first floor. The pumps did not work as they had hoped, and water filled their crawlspace again.
“We usually have time,” Smith said on Tuesday, sitting on her sunny upper back porch. “We can get everything off the floor.”
She woke up at around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday to find water in the yard. Smith had less time than she thought, scrambling to pick up last-minute items in the morning as she watched the water creep toward her bedroom’s door. Shortly after, the dirty, murky water invaded the first floor of her house.
“The last four hours, it just came in with a vengeance,” Smith said Thursday, recalling waking up to the rushing water.
On Thursday, the first floor of the house was filled with fans and dehumidifiers. The contents of drawers were heaped on beds, and damp possessions lay drying in the sun. Though friends and family members had vacuumed and mopped the floors, Smith said more cleaning was required to remove all the glacial silt that covered her recently waterproofed flooring.
“You can't make your house like a boat,” she said.
Taking matters into their own hands
Some View Drive residents said the city told them they could not put up their own barriers, since their properties are in the floodway.
For the same reason, it’s challenging for the city to install HESCO barriers where homes are constructed within the regulated floodway.
After the flood, Adriana Hurtt said she feels like a “sitting duck” without permission to do her own flood mitigation.
“The city said we couldn’t put HESCO barriers or anything against the river flow,” Hurtt said.
She sees the buyout program as the only option. Without hesitation, she said if the program is offered, she and her husband will sell.
“I might as well abandon the property and just let it there, because I don't want to go through another remodel,” Hurtt said. This year, the entire first floor of her house was flooded, leaving only an upstairs bedroom untouched.
Other View Drive residents hired a hydrologist to assess their properties and recommend solutions after realizing the city would not install barriers. Carol and Don Habeger, with the help of two neighboring households, built a rock berm surrounding their properties at the end of View Drive.
“We have met together often,” Carol Habeger said. “We have made sure we had a plan that wouldn't hurt the other neighbors in the neighborhood, and we've offered to help them as well.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Carol Habeger was putting in plants along the new artificial hillside around her house. The berm almost entirely blocks the view of the Mendenhall River, but it could be heard rushing nearby.
She said she felt safe as the river rose and did not plan to evacuate.
“We've prepared a lot,” Carol Habeger said. “The last two years, we have had major damage to our house. It has reduced our property to half-value, and so we're trying to build it up, because we're old and we want to retire and sell the house.”
But on Wednesday, the flood waters “went under” the Habegers’ berm, according to Angela Smith.
Carol Habeger did not want to speak with reporters on Thursday in the aftermath of the flood. Cracks were visible in the berm, showing signs of seepage.
Bob and Chris Winter also expressed frustration with city flood mitigation strategies that they feel neglect View Drive residents. Chris Winter said they first approached the city about flooding in 2014, when more than a foot of water entered their house. She said they felt ignored.
Since then, they have also invested in protecting their house from annual flooding. Chris Winter said they have elevated their driveway and garage by six feet and their house by five feet.
Now, with the possibility of a buyout, they are reluctant to leave the house that they have lived in for 44 years.
“This is our retirement home,” Bob Winter said. “As much as we've sunk in raising the house two times, I don't want to have to leave it.”
Angela Smith said that she and her husband have almost paid off the mortgage on their house.
If they chose to go forward with the voluntary buyout, they would have to start over and may look for options outside Juneau’s expensive housing market. Smith said thinking about giving up her home comes with a lot of grief, but she “can't live with this every year.”
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356. Contact Natalie Buttner at natalieb@juneauindependent.com.
