Beach Road residents will have to wait another year for a permanent road and power to their homes if the Haines Borough Assembly follows the advice of state disaster officials and landslide researchers.
Landslide Technology’s George Machan summarized the preliminary findings of their analysis of the fatal Dec. 2 landslide on Beach Road and answered questions from area residents at a townhall meeting Monday. The meeting came after a discussion between the borough assembly last week on whether to quickly move forward with restoring power and permanent road access. The report lists eight geologic hazards that pose potential risk to the neighborhood. Snow cover hampered the state-contracted geotechnical assessment and the findings are still considered preliminary.
Beach Road property owner Cindy Buxton asked if there were any ideas for getting people back in their homes. “It sounds like we’re not going to have access to our homes with electricity for another year. We all know that’s not very good for houses. Does anybody have any sort of pathway that they see so we can get something temporary and still do this study?”
“The hard, fast answer is probably not,” said Alaska Department of Military and Veteran Affairs Emergency Program manager Sam Walton.
Alaska Power and Telephone Haines operations manager Lance Caldwell said the company is unwilling to put staff at risk until the area’s safety can be assured.
“Currently, based on what we’ve seen on the report, AP&T is not interested in putting our personnel in harm’s way at this time,” Caldwell said. “We will be waiting for the next report.”
Borough public facilities director Ed Coffland said establishing whether the area is safe should be the decision point on how to move forward.
“Whether you go down or establish a better surface on the existing temporary road, you still have the same danger for rocks to be rolling down from above. That shouldn’t be the decision point,” Coffland said. “You’re still going to need the study regardless of what we do with the road in order to determine if it’s safe to use that road.”
Walton told residents that FEMA was unlikely to fund the second half of the study if the borough constructed a permanent road through the slide debris, an option preferred by Beach Road taskforce members.
FEMA won’t use tax dollars toward projects that are demonstrated to be unnecessary, Walton said at Monday’s meeting.
“If we say this analysis is necessary in order to conduct the business needed in that area in a safe fashion to work toward permanent restoration, then we believe FEMA will support it. If the decision is made to move forward with permanent restoration without doing the analysis, it’s our best guess that FEMA will take that as a strong indication then that further analysis is not believed to be necessary by the jurisdiction.”
The first phase of the study cost more than $345,000 and the second, final round is expected to cost a similar amount. The state will receive a 75% reimbursement from FEMA. Results from the second round of analysis aren’t expected until December.
Beach Road resident Michale Balise told the CVN he was discouraged by the meeting. Balise is one of a few residents leading the charge on restoring power to the area. As a member of the Beach Road Working Group, he said he wants to see what officials can do to ensure safe access.
“How hard is it to fix up the road a little bit and sign off that it’s safe,” Balise said. “I can see why people won’t want to do that, but I’m hoping they will. I want to try to satisfy AP&T’s wish for reasonably safe access.”
Scenarios outlined in the geotechnical report include catastrophic failure of landslide debris, localized failure of debris, loose boulders rolling downhill, crumbling of slopes near the top of the slide path, slumping of the tension crack observed in ground adjacent to the slide, failure of bedrock slopes on either side of the slide, failure of colluvial slopes on either side of the slide, and erosion of the bedrock newly exposed by the slide.
Most scenarios were given low to moderate risk and likelihood of occurrence with the exception of the catastrophic failure of the existing slide debris, failure of adjacent colluvial slopes and erosion of the newly exposed bedrock. The catastrophic failure of slide debris is classified as “a high-risk event with low likelihood of occurrence.”