Late Tuesday evening  Haines’ Small Boat Harbor was mostly quiet except for the occasional crack of ice breaking and sliding into the water, until you walked up on the Commander’s Palace.  There, a steady stream of water pumped continuously from a hose snaked out of one of the windows. It’s a lot of water, though the flooding had not yet reached the main deck. 

(Rashah McChesney/Chilkat Valley News) Water is pumped off of the Commander's Place at the Small Boat Harbor on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024, in Haines, Alaska.
(Rashah McChesney/Chilkat Valley News) Water is pumped off of the Commander’s…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...