Watch: Woman rescued from vehicle in floodwater in Haines
- Chilkat Valley News
- 47 minutes ago
- 2 min read
By Rashah McChesney and Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
A woman was rescued from her flooded car in a ditch along Sawmill Road early Wednesday morning.
Emergency responders headed to the road’s intersection with the Haines Highway just after 8 a.m. where they found the Subaru stuck in water up to its bumper.
Alaska State Trooper Josh Whitby backed his truck down into the water with Haines Borough firefighters Nishan Weerasinghe and Sean Silk in the truck bed. Weerasinghe and Silk leaned out, opened the car door and helped the trapped woman climb out and into the truck.
She was quickly bundled into an ambulance to warm up and get checked out by medical staff.
Silk said the woman told first responders she had been driving in the middle of the road and slid sideways into the ditch.
Assistant fire chief Brian Clay called it a good reminder to avoid driving through floodwaters as hazards are not always readily apparent.
Borough police sent out an emergency alert Wednesday morning warning of the flooding and standing water near the Haines airport and at Mile 6 of the Haines Highway. Weeks of snow and freezing temperatures have left some normal drainage channels plugged throughout the Chilkat Valley.
As emergency crews worked, nearby properties were flooding, or beginning to flood, including the Eagle’s Nest trailer park and Moose Horn Laundry.
Moose Horn owners Taylor Ashton and Cesar Ramirez said they saw the highway culvert outside their property completely full at around 4 p.m. Monday evening — their first indication of imminent flooding.
Over the next few hours, the water continued to build. One neighbor, Joliena Olsen, said she checked the Sawmill Creek around 10 p.m. Tuesday and saw that it was about five inches from running over its banks.
By midnight, Ramirez said he could see water building in the Moose Horn parking lot.
Wednesday morning, Ramirez and Ashton said they thought the water might have been receding. But even so, it was knee-high outside many of their buildings, and deeper, they estimated, on the side of the property toward the creek.
The flooding, as a whole, didn’t come as a surprise, they said.
“In 2020 (the property) flooded out,” said Ramirez. “It seems like the same scenario now: a bunch of snow, then a bunch of rain, then a quick thaw.”
The flooding was significantly deeper that year, Ashton added, but said they had also taken significant mitigation action in the time since, including digging two drainage trenches on their property.
Ashton said the business does not qualify for flood insurance. “Hopefully we can get some funds from the emergency disaster relief fund.”
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
