Retired school teacher Kristina Mulready lived in Haines from 2010 to 2013, before moving to Juneau in 2021.
Speaking by phone Wednesday, Mulready said her Riverside area home was flooded around 3 a.m. on Tuesday when the Mendenhall River crested at 15.99 feet, higher than last year’s previous record by more than a foot, according to the National Weather Service.
“It sounded like a waterfall….it was loud….and we couldn’t figure out what was going on.” Mulready lives with her husband Will Hayes on Riverside Drive. “My husband got up and looked out the window and said, ‘We have to get up right now.’”
The higher level of flooding resulted in evacuations and damage to many areas although no deaths or major injuries were reported as the water began receding.
Mulready said they got their belongings and prioritized items that could not get wet and put them on top of couches, counters, dressers and shelves. “As we were finishing, the water started coming into the house.”
The water rose up to three inches inside Mulready’s home and even deeper in the garage since it is lower than the rest of the house.
“We have a small chest freezer on our back porch that was floating. I didn’t think that was a thing, but clearly they can float. I had put towels in front of our back door. It’s a glass door, and it didn’t stop the water from coming in, but it definitely slowed down, and the water was up, probably a foot against the door. And so watched our chest freezer just kind of float there,” she said.
Mulready said as of Wednesday evening her backyard still had standing water and has not gone down.
“There’s a lot of belongings in the front yard and the front porch drying out still, and most of our neighbors are in the same predicament. We just finished pumping out the crawl space. We had a very, very kind neighbor who worked for a plumbing company who … brought home industrial sump pumps, thinking he was gonna have to pump out his own crawl space,” she said.
The flooding was caused by the break of an ice dam at Suicide Basin — a process known as a jökulhlaup that has occurred annually since 2011. Last year the river crested at 14.97 feet on Aug. 6, 2023, which far exceeded the previous record of 11.99 feet in 2016. Major damage to homes and infrastructure from last year’s flood resulted in large-scale efforts to line the banks of the river with rock fill to prevent erosion and new equipment was installed increasing monitoring of the basin.
The “worst-case scenario” of flooding can’t be predicted precisely, said National Weather Service in Juneau meteorologist Andrew Park in an interview with the Juneau Empire on Tuesday morning.
“We have a good idea of how much water is in the basin,” he said. “We have a good idea of how the river responds to that water. The biggest unknown is how efficient is that release?”
“If you have a bathtub in your house full of water and you pop a pinhole, you have time to respond,” Park said. “But if you just dump the whole bathtub of water into your home, that’s a big problem. You don’t have time to respond to that. The river is like that — where you take all that water in the basin, you dump it in at once, the water has nowhere to go and you’ve exceeded the capacity of that system for output.”
Park said Suicide Basin has dropped over 300 feet since the release began Sunday.
Safeguards protect some areas hit hard last year
While the Mendenhall River rose steadily Sunday and Monday, it took until about noon Monday to pass the “moderate flood” level of 10 feet and reached the “major flood” stage of 14 feet at about 9 p.m., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Prediction Service website.
Residents of homes and condominiums along Riverside Drive that were severely damaged by last year’s flooding gathered on Monday evening along reinforced riverbanks, watching the river pass by without feeling any impending threat. There appeared to be no sign the reinforced bank was suffering the erosion responsible for much of last year’s damage.
Adam Bishop, a River Road resident, said he is confident in the reinforcement along the riverbank. He lived along the Mendenhall River during the record flooding in 2023.
“It was terrible,” he said. “My mom — she was here alone, and I was off in college, and basically it undercut our house. And so our house was about to collapse, and so I booked the flight to come help her out, and we moved everything out of this house and all the community was amazing. Like, we had 20 people show up and basically an assembly line just to get the stuff out of the house.”
He said it was a traumatic event and it was frustrating because they couldn’t receive flood insurance. Bishop said regular insurance couldn’t cover their losses and FEMA didn’t either.
“A lot of our stuff was damaged, but in less of a materialistic way, I would say,” Bishop said. “Like we just lost our entire lawn. Like we had a giant lawn and beautiful trees, and all of the landscaping that we’d spent pretty much our whole lives doing. My father built this house, actually. And so it was just really painful to watch all that nature go and just the memories we got attached with our lawn.”
Juneau Empire reporter Jasz Garrett and editor Mark Sabbatini contributed to this story from Juneau. For further updataes, follow their continuing coverage at JuneauEmpire.com.