Former resident Andrew Friske this week said he feels lucky his family wasn’t hurt in an Aug. 18 landslide in Sitka that crushed his house and claimed the lives of three men he knew.

Friske is a 1996 Haines High School graduate and Mount Edgecumbe High School principal whose parents, Terry and Sylvia Friske, taught school in Haines. Since April, Friske and his parents have been building a duplex in the Kramer Avenue subdivision they planned to share.

On the morning of the slide, Friske’s wife Becky and their two young children planned to go to the duplex and paint some trim in the garage they’d set up the previous night.

Fortunately, they got off to a late start. A landslide at 9:45 a.m. that started 1,000 feet above the house knocked down trees that destroyed half of it, collapsed the garage and “pushed in” the structure’s entryway and kitchen.

“The only thing that wasn’t touched were my parents’ bedroom and bath… More than likely, we lost everything,” Friske said in an interview this week.

An electrician working in Friske’s house saw a wall of logs 20-30 feet high pass by. “He said it looked like a train going by.” The man heard and felt the slide, but it hit so quickly, he just dropped to his knees and prayed, Friske said.

Two workers painting a house 50 feet downhill of Friske’s died in the slide. Elmer and Ulises Diaz had played on Friske’s junior high basketball team and on city league teams with Friske. William Stortz, a municipal building inspector and fire marshal who also died in the slide, had worked on Friske’s house.

“The house in front of us disappeared. There was nothing left. Not even the foundation. It was pushed off its foundation and covered up by logs,” Friske said.

Evidence of the force of the slide is that there’s an excavator pushed up against his house’s garage, under a pile of sheared trees that’s about 20 feet high, Friske said.

Friske is now unsure of his neighborhood. “We definitely want to do as much research as we can” including getting geological information about the slope’s future stability. “We love the area, but after this we’re going to have a hard time falling asleep in the house if it’s raining.”

The loss of the house is a financial blow, Friske said, as early word from an insurance adjuster isn’t good. Also, because the house is not considered the family’s primary residence, it’s not eligible for some types of government assistance.

“My parents kind of put their life savings into this house and now it’s spent. So we’re working on things,” Friske said.

The family was planning to move in by October, but is now unsure of its next move, Friske said. “We were planning this for a long time. We made it ADA compliant for my family as they got older. Now we’re re-evaluating everything.”

“It’s hard to know what to do. God has a plan, but we don’t know what it is,” he said.