Water fills the street on Meander Way; residents know it could have been worse
- Natalie Buttner
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Those staying on Meander Way endure the crest of the 2025 glacial outburst flood and reflect on how this year is different
Wearing a drysuit, Sean Smack pulled Locke and Melissa Brown in a raft through brown floodwater to their house on Meander Way. It was the first time they had seen the house since they evacuated at midnight on Wednesday, eight hours before.
“Well, it's not as bad as I expected,” Locke Brown said, as they approached their house from the water.
Last year, the Browns had three feet of water inside their house, he said. This year, the water is below the porch.
The couple being towed back home was among the many people starting to return to normal routines after record glacial outburst flooding of the Mendenhall River for a third straight year caused a deluge of disruptions for hundreds of households. Some residents spent the night elsewhere at the urging of city officials, while many others chose to stay at home.
Down the street, Cori Barkey checked in on the house of a neighbor who evacuated.
Her parents have lived on Meander Way for 37 years. They also own and rent the house next door.
Barkey said her father, John Schoenmann, is visually impaired. Her mom evacuated, but Schoenmann refused to leave the house. Last year, he was alone in the house as the flood became increasingly high. Barkey had to rescue him at 11 p.m. in what she calls a “very sketchy situation.”
This year, she and her son stayed overnight with Schoemann, even as they watched neighbors leave when water began spilling into the street.
“It kept sounding like gunshots, but it's literally the trees that are in the woods snapping, just popping so loud,” she said.
Trying to keep up morale, they stayed up late, even convincing a restaurant to deliver takeout.
Alaska Electric Light and Power issued a notice at 4:45 a.m. announcing that they were cutting off power to Meander Way as the river level reached 16 feet. Barkey expressed gratitude that the power stayed on until the sun was coming up.
Barkey said her family was caught by surprise when the water reached the windows of her parents’ house during the 2024 glacial outburst flood.
“It was just mayhem,” Barkey said. “My parents lost everything on the first floor, everything, and so they've been living in a weird kind of — they didn't re-carpet, they did not re-sheet rock. They did put insulation in, but that's it.”
She said they were waiting to see if the levee of HESCO barriers, constructed by the city to protect neighborhoods at risk of flooding, would work before reinvesting in their first floor.
She and her son, Seth Manley, walked around in the yard assessing the progress of the seeping water. They agreed that without the HESCO barriers, they would not be able to be outside.
According to the National Weather Service, the river crested at 16.65 feet at 7:15 a.m. on Wednesday. At 8:23 a.m., river water had pooled in the Schoenmann’s backyard and water had filled their crawl space.
“It's failing, but it would be way worse without it, because the water's just raging right there,” she said, looking out at the rushing Mendenhall.
Nonetheless, Barkey said she was angry about the HESCO barriers. She was frustrated with the process and how close the barrier is to her parents’ house.
“They, I felt like, got the most amount of property taken from that, and I felt like they could have made this a little bit further out,” Barkey said. The HESCO barriers cut her parents’ house off from a swath of their backyard, including a flagpole with a flag that Barkey said they can no longer change.
The HESCO barriers are close to the back of the house, which once looked out at the Mendenhall River. Barkey pointed out a row of flowery lawn decorations that they have stuck into a HESCO barrier behind their house.
“That is the garden that we did for my mom. She had three big picture windows,” she said. “It is extremely depressing for the elderly that are home all day. They have nothing to look at.”
On Wednesday morning, Sterling Snyder and Kevin Tillotson were sitting on Tillotson’s second-story back porch, watching the river rush by.
Snyder flew to Juneau from Anchorage to help his brother-in-law, Tillotson, prepare his house on Meander Way for the flood.
The house is distinctively protected. In addition to other weatherproofing, Tillotson and Snyder were up until 3 a.m. Wednesday, wrapping around the outside of the first floor of the house in an enormous sheet of visqueen.
“If you look inside the house right now, the reason we're here and not freaking out inside the house is: inside the house is dry,” Snyder said. “There's water coming up from the crawl space, but there's water all around the house right now. And if you look at the stem wall of the foundation in the crawl space, there's minor trickles here and there.”
Although water is leaking underneath the HESCO barriers, Snyder said the situation would have been much more serious without them.
“This is much, much higher than last year,” he said. “This would have been utterly disastrous.”
Smack waded into Tillotson’s flooded backyard and called up to ask if they needed gasoline. After hearing that Tillotson was “good on fuel”, Smack pulled a friend and KTOO reporters in his raft back to a relatively dry part of the street, stopping by his house to refill his backyard pump with fuel.
“Meander Way Water Taxi,” he calls out to neighbors jokingly. “Once a year, no fear.”
• Contact Natalie Buttner at natalieb@juneauindependent.com.
