The Haines Borough won’t be eligible to apply this year for millions of federal disaster mitigation dollars that could help compensate Beach Road residents for landslide damage and buy out properties threatened by future slides.

A state specialist and borough staff revealed at an Oct. 13 meeting that Haines can’t apply this cycle for FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant because the program requires an up-to-date hazard mitigation plan, which the borough doesn’t have. That likely will be ready by next year, and the borough could apply then, according to Jeremy Zidek, public information officer at Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Although Haines might not have secured funding even if it applied for the competitive grant, Haines resident Steve Wishstar said delaying the application will have an impact on people like him, whose properties are in the Beach Road red zone — an area deemed unsafe beneath the December landslide crack.

“It does put a huge financial burden on everybody who’s still paying mortgages and not living there or deciding to move back in there even though they feel unsafe,” Wishstar said. Six residents own property in the red zone, and some, like Wishstar, he said, are still paying mortgages on houses they don’t plan to move back into due to concerns about safety and emotional trauma associated with the area.

The state’s individual disaster assistance program ends in nine months, Wishstar said. That money helps but doesn’t cover all expenses from the December weather event. “A lot of people are still paying dues on their homes they don’t live in. Some people had to move out of state to replace lost income. Some people had to move in with family to make ends meet. And some people are even on the verge of foreclosures,” Wishstar said.

Created in 2018, BRIC helps municipalities repair or upgrade infrastructure to reduce future damage from natural disasters. In 2020, the grant provided more than $377 million split among 22 communities across the nation. Two of the 22 selected were “relocation” projects, geared to move housing or infrastructure out of hazardous areas.

Local hazard mitigation plans, which BRIC requires of applicants, must be approved by FEMA. At a public meeting about FEMA grants in May, local and state officials sounded optimistic about BRIC, according to some residents who attended the meeting.

“Earlier in the summer, when we had the town hall, that’s really the last time I heard our HMP (hazard mitigation plan) was a top priority for the state,” Sylvia Heinz said at the Oct. 13 meeting. Heinz plays a variety of roles in disaster recovery, including as the Long Term Recovery Group coordinator. She said she was surprised to hear now that the plan wouldn’t be ready before the January 2022 BRIC deadline and that more consistent communication throughout the summer would’ve helped affected residents and supportive organizations plan.

Borough Mayor Douglas Olerud told the CVN that FEMA and state officials had made clear earlier this summer that “it would be very unlikely” for the mitigation plan to be completed in time for the upcoming BRIC deadline. Olerud said the borough’s focus for the last several months has been preparing for next year’s BRIC cycle.

There appears to be little that borough officials could have done to move the hazard mitigation plan along this year. The state sent Haines’ application for funding to FEMA through the Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program in January 2019 but didn’t receive funding until last March, Zidek said. Due to a staffing shortage, FEMA didn’t award PDM funding for any Alaskan communities between September 2018 and March 2021, according to FEMA spokesperson Erin Ward.

“They sat on two complete years of cycles nationally. This was not some person in Anchorage. This was not the Haines Borough not doing their job. This was not someone in Seattle not doing their job. This was FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C., stopping two complete cycles of a national program,” Rick Dembroski, an emergency management specialist at Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said at the Oct. 13 meeting.

In July, a state contractor began developing Haines’ hazard mitigation plan, which is still being drafted. Local mitigation plans usually take about 12 months to develop, according to Zidek. The state budgeted $60,000 for Haines’ plan and estimates it will take 400 hours to complete.

Once the plan is done, Haines officials and the public will have 30 days to review it before it goes to the state for a 30-day review. Then FEMA will have up to 45 days to approve it.

Even without the plan, Haines will proceed in the coming months with an application for another FEMA grant, the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), a statewide competition to receive a slice of a $4 million pie. The borough can get a mitigation plan waiver from the state for HMGP, but not for BRIC, which is a national competition.

While property acquisition falls within the scope of HMGP, state specialist Dembroski said FEMA is “not going to accept a project with an ongoing study,” referring to the geotechnical work being done to assess risk in the Beach Road landslide area. “It would be my opinion to look at other options for projects until the geotechnical study is over,” Dembroski said.

At the May meeting, state employees said that HMGP likely wouldn’t provide enough funding to cover a Beach Road buyout.

For an HMGP application, borough staff suggested a $1.2 million renovation of the borough’s wastewater treatment plant, which was damaged during the December storm and struggles to handle large amounts of runoff.

“If we’re going to pursue HMGP programs, pursue some that save people’s lives,” Beach Road resident Todd Winkel told officials on Oct. 13. Winkel also called for an end to the geotechnical study, which he worries is increasing risk by removing trees and further destabilizing the slope above his property. Dembroski said the study’s findings will be crucial to include in the borough’s grant applications, which will be reviewed by technical experts expecting to see a scientific risk assessment.

As the borough works on its grant applications, Steve Wishstar and his family are temporarily moving in with relatives in the Lower 48. Wishstar said they plan to return to Haines but not Beach Road. A Haines friend made available a house for the Wishstars to rent, but it won’t be ready until early 2022.

On the road south, Steve’s wife, Vanessa, said of their car, “This is our only house left. We’re driving it.”

Additional information

Beach Road resident Steve Wishstar said he plans to recommend a Haines Mitigation Grant Program proposal for a project he’s developing with the Haines Science Center, a nonprofit co-founded in May by Wishstar and Haines resident Steven Villano. Dubbed Student Hydrology and Atmospheric Monitoring Network (SHAMN), Wishstar’s project would engage 11th-grade students at Haines High School in establishing a boroughwide weather and groundwater monitoring system.

“After the landslide, there were a whole bunch of experts that came to our town to figure out what happened,” Wishstar said. “Everything they were saying to all of us was that there are holes in the data. They just don’t have enough data.”

Wishstar’s goal is to fill the data gap by installing groundwater pressure gauges and thermometers in consenting residents’ wells and to create a hands-on, high-tech learning experience for students. In addition to working with sensors, students would learn to make weather observations, like watching streams and measuring snow depth.

“I want them to do a mini engineering course,” said Wishstar, who holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University and taught engineering at University of Colorado, Boulder. “​​It’s going to help with workforce development and getting students into colleges.”

Aiming to start next academic year, Wishstar said ideally the class would install 10 to 20 sensors per year. Each sensor would upload data wirelessly for students to observe in real time. There also would be a dashboard for residents to check on conditions.

Earlier this year, Alaska Conservation Foundation awarded the program a $1,000 micro-grant.