As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, the slide zones near 19 Mile and 23 Mile Haines Highway will continue to dump debris on the landscape below, local Department of Transportation foreman Matt Boron said this week.
That’s why he wasn’t surprised when yet another slide episode triggered by torrential rains blocked traffic last Friday afternoon. Rocks, logs and mud from the 19 Mile slide covered about 300 feet of road with an average depth of six to seven feet, Boron said. That slide deposited about 10,000 to 15,000 cubic yards of material, while a smaller, simultaneous slide at 23 Mile yielded between 5,000 and 8,000 cubic yards.
“For me, it has just become business as usual,” Boron said of the slides. “To me, it’s not even newsworthy, it consumes so much of my life.”
The highway remained closed for several hours into Friday evening, with DOT sporadically allowing cars through when they were able to clear one lane for travel. By the time a couple of vehicles had gone through, though, the lane would fill back in with muck.
“It’s just so wet and runny that you scoop and scoop and scoop in the same spot and it just keeps coming,” he said.
Suzanne Vuillet-Smith, a community family services worker with SEARHC, got stuck on the Klukwan side of the slide, where she was working for the day. Vuillet-Smith learned of the road closure and had resigned herself to a night on the floor at the Klukwan clinic when she got word DOT was letting people through.
“They had it coned off and you could see they had like six huge loaders working like gangbusters. They were hauling butt,” she said. “It was like trying to clear soup without a ladle. It was just a mess.”
According to DOT communications officer Jeremy Woodrow, each major slide involves the displacement of 20,000 to 50,000 cubic yards of debris. The slides cost the department $200,000 annually.
Boron said much of the expense comes from renting equipment from local companies. “When these big things happen, the state does not own big enough equipment to deal with this, so we have to rent equipment from a contractor. And big equipment is very expensive,” he said.
Not only are the slides expensive, but they pose a significant hazard to motorists. Between 2004 and 2014, the highway has been closed about 12 times, including a multiple-day closure during 2005’s Thanksgiving season.
So, what can be done? The short answer, according to Boron, is not much.
“As far as a solution, there really is no solution. It’s like having a road in front of a lava flow in Hawaii,” he said.
The state can engineer the road to be less dangerous and make clean-up less costly, though, he said.
Woodrow said the current plan for Haines Highway improvements includes elevating the road near the slide so debris can continue its path toward the river. Large culverts would allow the material to move underneath the road, he said.
“Our idea with trying to build a road that goes over the slide area is just to let nature take its course,” he said.
DOT is currently in the middle of a permitting process that will determine whether it can deposit slide material into the Chilkat River. Currently, the agency piles debris along the highway.
Whether or not more slides will occur this fall is weather dependent, Boron said. “The slides have been very active the last five years or so, and if we keep getting this heavy rain, it’s highly likely.”