Haines residents Steven Villano and Steve Wishstar are starting Haines Science Center, a nonprofit to gather and synthesize data to help Chilkat Valley residents interpret the surrounding landscape.

“We’re hoping to coalesce information and interpret it in an educational sense to produce language that can be understood, so a deeper understanding and decision-making can come out of it,” said Villano, the center’s executive director.

Both Villano and science director Wishstar had been toying with science center-like ideas when the Dec. 2 landslide occurred. The slide took out houses and ended two lives in the neighborhood where the two men live. Villano comes from a museum curator background and Wishstar, whose background is in aerospace engineering, had been planning to start a science program for high school students.

“I had wanted to do an intro to aerospace engineering class, including a high-altitude ballooning experiment. I am going to create a program where students create (tiny) satellites, and we launch them to 100,000 feet,” Wishstar said.

Separated from their homes on Beach Road, the two got to know each other in the days after the slide, convening at the Legion for meals along with other displaced residents, and their ideas began to take the form of a science center.

“These last six months, it’s been so devastating, the loss of property, the loss of life, everything, I just wanted something good to come of it,” Villano said.

Villano and Wishstar said they realized there was a need for an entity that could coalesce the landslide-related data being gathered in the wake of the disaster and that while the focus was on Beach Road, data gathering needed to occur boroughwide.

“There’s a need for long-term and continuous monitoring across the borough. But there’s no (existing) facility or budget to do it. We thought, what if we brought it forward in a phased approach, got monitors in the ground, collected more data to establish more baselines,” Villano said.

In Sitka, after a deadly landslide in 2015, the data-coalescing role was filled by the Sitka Sound Science Center, an organization that had been around since the early 2000s with a primary focus on marine science. With a grant from the RAND Corporation, the science center installed rain gauges, water pressure gauges and other monitoring systems with the aim of putting data on a user-friendly website so people could make their own risk assessments.

Initially, the Haines Science Center will focus on landslide-specific information in the valley, but the hope is to broaden its scope over time. The center’s first project is the Student Hydrology and Atmospheric Monitoring Network (SHAMN) project, a boroughwide weather data-gathering endeavor.

“Phase one, we’re going to advertise on our website, looking for anyone who has a weather station that’s collecting data to report back to us,” Wishstar said. In the fall, he’s hoping to start the project’s next phase.

“It would be a senior design project. Over the course of one or two semesters, students would actually get to build a weather instrument and place it, and take readings from it and monitor it,” he said.

Villano and Wishstar are currently reaching out to other science-oriented organizations in the valley like Takshanuk Watershed Council, Haines Avalanche Center and Haines Friends of Recycling, as well as local fisheries and ocean science experts, with the goal of looking for data-sharing opportunities and information holes the center can address.

“When we talk to experts, we will look for areas where we can aid in the understanding,” Villano said.

Those Villano and Wishstar have approached, spoke favorably of the science center.

“I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s what Haines needs,” said Haines Avalanche Center executive director Erik Stevens, who has been involved with ongoing stability monitoring in the Beach Road landslide area.

Although a science center suggests a physical space, the two said the goal is to get the organization up and running as a knowledge-gathering entity first. Initially, the center will exist online. The website went live earlier this month.

“At some point, we want a physical space people can visit and learn about many different areas,” Villano said, listing topics including fisheries, recycling and climate change.

The two are in the process of registering the organization and looking for funding. Prior to moving into a permanent home, an event that’s still several years out, Villano said it’s possible the center will put on popup-style exhibits.

The science center can be visited at https://hainesscience.org/.