Easter reminds us what matters. This year, the best gift is awareness
- Dorene Lorenz
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Dorene Lorenz
In July of 2021, I spent a sleepless night tracking the second-largest earthquake in Alaska history, the 8.2 Chignik, as its energy moved across the ocean toward coastal communities.
I was a journalist tucked away in a dry cabin hours far from the station. Just a screen, a signal, and a growing sense of responsibility. I followed and relayed real-time reports to other newsie night owls as the wave reached shore, sharing updates as frightened locals gathered on hillsides after a desperate count of the community’s noses. Their exhausted voices described what they were seeing, or in this case, what they were not. The water rose, but not by much — in most places nothing happened. We all made a collective sigh of relief.
Juneau was in the model — in a worst-case scenario the projections showed water reaching this community. Sitting there in the dark, it became clear just how thin the margin was. There was no obvious way to warn people. No simple mechanism to wake this city up and tell people to move, quickly, uphill. No tsunami warning siren, not even a jökulhlaup warning signal, to send families to safety on a well-marked path in the middle of the night.
No worries, my Juneau people scoffed: the channel is long, the water is relatively shallow, and we are in protected waters, so the risk is low.
Despite their well-meaning assurances, that realization has stayed with me, because the most dangerous wave Juneau could face is not the one that travels across the ocean. It’s the one that starts right here.
On Good Friday of 1964, Seward was not undone by a distant tsunami rolling in from the Gulf of Alaska. It was devastated by something far more immediate. The ground itself failed. As the earthquake tore through the town, the waterfront did not just break, it collapsed. Docks, rail yards and shoreline slid into Resurrection Bay, dragging the seafloor down with them. In places, the harbor bottom dropped 20 to more than 50 feet, leaving deep scars beneath the surface — and then the water moved, not once, but repeatedly.
Each collapse displaced massive volumes of water, sending surges back through the harbor with escalating force. What remained of the Alaska Railroad docks was ripped apart. Fuel tanks ruptured. Railcars were torn loose. Burning oil spread across the surface and was driven into the shoreline, igniting fires that consumed Seward’s industrial core. This was not a single wave. It was a chain reaction.
My great-grandfather Wayne Heinbaugh stood two blocks from shore long enough to see the ocean floor exposed, ancient shipwrecks sitting where water should have been, and had the presence of mind to run uphill before it all came roaring back.
Juneau is not protected. It is configured much like Seward is. This city sits in a confined system. Gastineau Channel is like Resurrection Bay, tight, steep, and unforgiving. In open water, energy disperses. In a channel, it concentrates, reflects, and accelerates. Now add gravity.
The slopes above downtown Juneau and Douglas Island are not static. They are fractured, saturated, and in places unstable. Southeast Alaska has never been shy about reminding us that hillsides move, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. When they do, and they enter water, the outcome is not theoretical. Water is displaced and a surge forms. It crosses the channel in moments. It rebounds, then again. Not one wave, several. Not hours of warning, minutes, if that.
That is why the new tsunami modeling in Cook Inlet matters. For decades, Anchorage was considered naturally protected. The inlet was too shallow, too broad, too dissipative. The energy would die before it reached the city.
Now we know that is not always true. Under the right conditions — high tide — the modeling shows a surge pushing all the way into Anchorage. Not a distant abstraction, but water moving through a populated city, and whether that becomes a nuisance or a disaster depends on timing with few feet of tide being the narrow margin between uneventful and catastrophic.
Under the more aggressive modeling scenarios for upper Cook Inlet, the concern is not a breaking wave, but a rapid rise in water level riding on top of the tide. If a ~10-foot surge were to coincide with a high tide, water could extend beyond the normal shoreline along Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm, pushing into low-lying areas of west and south Anchorage — including parts of the Port of Alaska, the industrial flats, and coastal infrastructure built near sea level. When a tsunami is layered onto a high tide, water is shown pushing well up Knik Arm, overtopping low-lying coastal margins and extending into the upper reaches toward the Matanuska-Susitna Valley.
A local earthquake, or even prolonged saturation and slope failure, could trigger a sudden collapse into Gastineau Channel. The result would be immediate, a fast-moving surge, strong currents, repeated pulses moving across the very shoreline where the city is built. The question is not how far the water has to go, it is how fast gravity can act. No one is suggesting catastrophe is imminent, but risk is not measured by frequency, it is measured by consequence.
Just a few years ago, a mountainside collapsed beside a retreating glacier in the Inside Passage sent tens of millions of cubic tons of rock into the water, triggering a tsunami that stripped bare entire shorelines hundreds of feet up in a large local tsunami that surged across the fjord within minutes. A slope failure into Gastineau Channel would not arrive as a clean, predictable crest. It would be a surge carrying debris, followed by powerful currents and repeated pulses that would happen exactly where Juneau lives, along the water.
That sleepless night comes back to me now, because even with a distant event, with time, with models, with people watching in real time, the gap between awareness and action was razor thin. Juneau was on the map, and there was no clear way to reach everyone who might need to move, and no one in Juneau knows where safety lies, where families should meet, where their “to go” bag is located.
Now consider both realities at once: a modeled wave arriving from afar, its impact determined by feet of tide or a wave born here, with no travel time at all. We do not have the luxury of choosing which scenario we prepare for. We are not inventing a threat. The physics are understood. The precedent is documented. The warning was written in Seward on a sobering Easter weekend over 60 years ago, and now reinforced in Anchorage.
Seward was not ready for what happened. They had just released the “Prosperity” edition of the local paper, filled with hopes and dreams that were literally washed away the next day. The lesson is clear — the most destructive waves are not always the ones we are watching for. Juneau is not immune, and the difference between safe and prepared is decided long before the water moves.
• Dorene Lorenz is the chair of the Alaska Commission for Human Rights.
