Midnight mudslide hits houses, cars in Sitka
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- Sep 12
- 4 min read
By Anna Laffrey
Daily Sitka Sentinel
Two houses and a number of parked vehicles were damaged late Wednesday night by debris from a small landslide that fell from Cedar Heights Road down to Cascade Creek Road.
No injuries were reported from the slide, which occurred at about 11:30 p.m. following hours of heavy rain.
Nicole Espinosa was asleep in her home on Cedar Heights Road when a section of the hillside near her home broke loose and swept away some of the land beneath her storage shed, which was left teetering on the edge of a steep scar.
“I didn't hear a thing," Espinosa said. "The rain was coming down very heavily, and I had my fan on. ... Then a cop came banging at the door at like 11:45 p.m.”
The slide occurred in the vicinity of past landslides. It left a scar that's at least 20 feet wide by 40 vertical feet, Fire Chief Craig Warren said today.
Espinosa said that, after the slide, police advised it would be safest to evacuate.
"I was like, ‘It’s one o’clock in the morning, where are we going to go?'" Espinosa said. "So we just stayed up until like three, four o’clock in the morning, listening, watching outside, just waiting for the rain to stop so that we could feel a little bit more safe about it not continuing to fall."
She’s grateful that her home wasn't damaged.
“I feel bad for the houses down (on Cascade Creek Road), they’re the ones that got hit with all of the debris that came down,” she said. “It moved four cars – it came down, and it slid the cars to the side.”
Her family is already making plans to remove their shed, and prepare for risks associated with future storms, she said.
“This is our first storm, we don’t know how many we’re going to have,” Espinosa said. “Now it’s a whole different kind of ball game."
Wednesday night's slide began amidst a period of heavy rain. A total of 3.98 inches was recorded at the Sitka airport between 12 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. During the same period 4.23 inches of rainfall was recorded at the Sitka Magnetic Observatory behind the Sitka National Cemetery, which is situated about 80 feet above sea level.
Rain picked up at about 5 p.m. Wednesday, with hourly rainfall in Sitka increasing from about two-tenths of an inch to about four-tenths of an inch, Juneau-based National Weather Service hydrologist Aaron Jacobs said today.
The maximum rainfall recorded in a three-hour period at the airport Wednesday was 1.21 inches between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. At the Magnetic Observatory, a peak of 1.28 inches of rain was recorded between 9 p.m. and midnight, Jacobs said.
City public relations director Melissa Lunas said a culvert on the corner of Edgecumbe Drive and Charteris Street was partially blocked during Wednesday's heavy rainfall, causing the ditch to be overtopped. The flooding caused some movement of gravel and some brush, Lunas said.
Flooding also occurred late Wednesday on Monastery Street between Hirst Street and Degroff Street. While flooding has now subsided, the street is closed while city workers determine whether the asphalt is stable, Lunas said.
Ahead of Wednesday's rainstorm, the city sent out an email advisory that the National Weather Service anticipated a total of two to five inches of rain would fall at lower elevations near Sitka between Wednesday and Thursday night.
At the Juneau weather service office, Jacobs said today that because of "communications issues," the Sitka airport rainfall data was not being received throughout the day Wednesday, and as a result the live-time precipitation data from the airport was not shown on sitkalandslide.org.
Based on the precipitation amounts the NWS had forecast, the dashboard showed that the risk of a landslide in Sitka was “low.”
KK Prussian, a local hydrologist who is friends with one of the residents affected by the landslide, said the weather service predicted high volumes of rainfall, as well as strong winds, to reach Sitka on Wednesday.
“It happened like it was expected,” Prussian said while visiting the site of the slide this morning.
She said Wednesday’s slide is “not your typical landslide that you see in a natural environment, because that area has been manipulated for development.” There isn’t a clear “head scarp” where the debris flow began, she said.
Prussian said the hillside isn't safe to walk on, and scientists will get a better read on the slide in the coming days.
Jacquie Foss, a local soil scientist who also visited the slide site this morning, noted that “there have been landslides along Cascade Creek Road in the past.”
“Sitka, as we know, is a really complex place where you have, you know, organic soil, and you have ash, and you have (glacial) till, and then if you have development over that, you kind of have a layer cake of stuff that doesn't always work together, and there can be a slippery surface between the layers, and volume to move down the hill,” Foss said.
“So typically, and we found it here, you'll have glacial till below, and ash on top. … And then you have some soil development on top of that, and then you have trees and vegetation,” Foss said.
“There's some steep slopes behind these houses,” Prussian said. “There's been, there's been development for homes for who knows how long. And there's been natural slides in the past in this area.”
Prussian and Foss urge Sitkans to stay engaged with potential landslide risks.
“I encourage people to think about drainage around their properties and think about what's happening up-slope,” Prussian said.
Foss recommended a number of tools and resources, including National Weather Service forecasts and special weather statements, the Indian River gauge that shows how much the flow of the river is changing over time, and the Sitka Landslide Dashboard.
People also should inspect drainage paths around homes, driveways, trails, culverts and ditches, Foss said.
“Just think about how that water is moving, and if it can get where it wants to go," Foss said.
• This story originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
