Klukwan researchers and emergency planners have been responding to the village’s landslide risk with efforts to develop an early warning system and prevent damage to the village from a slide area and debris fan near Mile 23 of the Haines Highway.
Chilkat Indian Village Landslides Hazards Program consultant Jess Kayser Forster, geologist and landslide researcher Josh Roering, and tribal council member and liaison for Klukwan’s Emergency Operations Center Shawna Hotch laid out the community’s response during a recent Southeast Alaska Landslide Information and Preparedness Partnership, or SLIPP, working group meeting last week.
Staff at the tribe had been working on climate planning since 2018, including a resilience plan. Hotch said the tribal council in Klukwan prioritized landslide-response management after the 2020 landslide.
“Traditionally we were a migrant people and when landslides or other events happened we moved seasonally,” Hotch said. “We don’t have that capability any more. So the lands that we have we really need to either protect or figure out how we can safely live here.”
Part of that safety planning includes landslide monitoring. Roering, who works at the University of Oregon, said his team is in the first year of installing tools to help with that effort. He said they looked to other similarly situated projects in the world, including one in Illgraben, Switzerland, that spent decades developing an array of instruments that measured everything from acoustic waves to ground motion and used trail cameras for visuals and weather stations.
“We’ve put in an initial preliminary version of all of these,” he said. The monitoring has been in place for just under a year. “We’re exploring the capability of these tools to do that type of work here in Klukwan. This is not a plug-and-play type thing. It really requires years of building up the reference and baseline data to figure out what we can and can’t detect.”
Kayser Forster said the tribal government has taken on a lot in developing its landslide hazards program, including climate planning, landslide assessment, mapping, risk reduction, building warning, response and recovery systems. That includes landslide-assessment mapping that was done between 2022-2024.
“That lift was daunting to even consider and then the Kutí project showed up,” she said.
Kutí is a partnership between scientists and tribal planners in Yakutat, Skagway, Hoonah, Craig, Kasaan, Klukwan, and a host of other experts and regional organizations. The group is working to develop tools to mitigate risks from things like landslides and floods.
What came out of the tribe’s mapping efforts was identification of clear debris paths impacting the highway in and around Klukwan. It also visualized one of the biggest threats to Klukwan.
“What we’re dealing with is this process where the debris comes down in a channel and you have a channel and you want that debris — or the stream —to stay in that channel,” Kayser Forster said. But sometimes the channel gets choked with debris, causing it to flow outside of its normal trajectory.
“That is a big issue for us because … the [alluvial] fan that Klukwan sits on is one of these fans that act in this way,” she said.
That means the debris would flow across the fan that Klukwan sits on, threatening homes and other infrastructure. And debris flows have pushed into the village before.
“One of my first memories of being in Klukwan is my parents using their hands to scoop out the sediment from under my grandmother’s house,” Hotch said.
Eventually, someone built a berm that directed some of the debris flow away from Klukwan, but that barrier has been less effective in recent years. Kayser Forster said tribal staff are now working on a similar project.
“The idea is to work with [the Department of Transportation], [the Department of Natural Resources], [and the] University of Oregon, to design, engineer and establish a berm that will be put there to prevent [the debris] from coming towards Klukwan and the Haines Highway.”
Kayser Forster said there’s not a lot of landslide mitigation happening yet in Southeast Alaska. “It’s a place that we’re all stepping into and there are big questions that come up.”
Among them, Kayser Forester said, is where the money will come from for projects like this that help communities deal with landslide threats.
“This is a good example of how a mitigation project for a village would also support an entire highway, the Haines Highway,” she said. “For Klukwan it would protect their landfill, their lagoons and prevent the [debris flow] from continuing to move south toward the school.”
She said the traditional funding avenues for landslide management have seen a significant shakeup and tribal governments have played a unique role.
“It has been really illuminating to see all of the ways in which a tribal government, through all of their different programs, can hold up various forms of landslide management,” she said.
She pointed to the Wrangell Cooperative Association getting an emergency declaration after a deadly landslide in 2024, a first for a tribal government in the state. She also said the Central Council ofTlingit & Haida Tribes of Alaska has put a lot of work into distributing resources and helping in response and recovery after slides.
“I think it’s great to start having conversations about our financial resources and our ability to respond to landslides regardless of where that money is flowing from, cause as a really good colleague, friend of mine at DOT would say—these landslides come no matter what our governments do,” she said.
The Maps
While the Chilkat Valley is not unique in facing landslides, the combination of steep slopes, heavy rainfall, aging infrastructure and soil instability means it’s a recurring risk. A new set of hazard maps from a state-funded study released in January helps to weigh that risk.
The report, Landslide hazard susceptibility mapping in Haines, Alaska, lays out areas in the borough that are susceptible to landslides and debris flow based on an analysis of the terrain, the types of soil in the Chilkat Valley, and data from recent years of ground-penetrating radar known as LiDAR.
The report shows that nearly all major drainages in the borough have the potential to produce debris flows — mass movements of loose soil and water that move quickly downhill. The maps show modeled paths where these flows could travel, including through neighborhoods or across roads.
In some cases, tree cover has masked ground movement and risk.
“There’s a lot of little areas north of town along Lutak that have bedrock that slid a little bit that I did not see even standing out there when we were doing field work,” state geologist Jillian Nicolazzo said. “ It’s hidden under trees, you can’t see it. But in that digital elevation model, it’s pretty obvious.”
While the LiDAR is valuable for identifying risks, it’s not a crystal ball. Rather, it’s a moment-in-time snapshot of an area, in the case of the Haines-area report from mapping efforts in 2021 and 2022, that concentrated on inhabited areas from Mud Bay to the Haines Highway past Klukwan.
“You can see what the surface of the Earth looks like at the moment that it’s flown. Any landslides or anything that occurs after that LIDAR was collected … it’s not going to be reflected there,” Nicolazzo said.
Nicollazo, who co-authored the new report, said people tend to look at the maps and panic if they see a lot of red (meaning high risk), particularly near their properties.
“I would just emphasize that the maps don’t tell us where a landslide is going to happen. There’s no prediction here. It’s just that that slope might be more susceptible,” she said.
She echoed a caveat included in the report that maps are not regulatory and are not for legal, engineering, or surveying purposes.
“Really for a site specific, you need somebody to go there to look at the actual soils, actual conditions, the water at that site itself,” she said.
The idea is to use them as a starting point for conversations about land-use planning and future development in vulnerable areas.
“If they are looking to whether it’s a residential area or maybe just a new recreational trail and campsite, take a look at accessibility maps, different hazard maps to get an idea of what sort of hazards are in the area, and that’ll help them decide what sort of engineering needs to go into the development,” she said.
Patty Brown, who chairs the borough’s planning commission, said the state report and maps will be useful to have as a reference.
“Our intention is to have ongoing conversations using the maps, but not exclusively the maps,” she said. “[They’re a] catalyst for conversations about how to mitigate risk and respond to risk.”
Brown said she understands that people are concerned about how the risk assessment and maps may be used and that they may not be able to get insurance if the borough government missteps.
“This business of adopting maps or not adopting maps, from where I sit, that doesn’t tell us what to do. This report is not telling anyone what to do,” Brown said.
She’s gotten feedback from individual landowners that they don’t want government help moving forward, and others who say both entities have a responsibility to make them whole and to inform them of the risks.
But Brown, who was on the ambulance crew that helped evacuate people from beyond the Beach Road slide in 2020, said the science is important. “One of the sad things for me, it still echoes for me, is that five of those households [on Beach Road], it was their first winter in Haines,” she said. “Being informed ahead of time would have been a nice thing, but it caught everybody by surprise.”
That question of what to do with the new landslide-hazard mapping is something other communities in Southeast have been grappling with for years. Local governments commission studies, scientists produce new hazard maps – but then find themselves in conflict with property owners.
In 2024, Juneau’s assembly updated its maps for avalanche and landslide zones after a controversial series of hearings and a compromise disclaimer stating that the new maps would not be used for regulatory purposes, as residents there said they were concerned about their property values.
In Sitka, the assembly commissioned landslide mapping in 2016 and then adopted a new section of code in 2017 that restricted development of certain areas based on their landslide risk. But the city then repealed that language after homeowners said they were not able to refinance or get insurance. Now the community has a hazard warning system and a website, sitkalandslide.org, where visitors can see what the community’s current risk of landslide is, and a forecast, as well as information about how to prepare for landslides, report them and learn more about the science behind them. That multi-disciplinary effort took more than $2 million and seven years to develop.
Haines
A new planning commission landslide-preparedness working group met for the first time last week to brainstorm what might be done to prepare for future slide events. The group includes commissioners
Patty Brown and Rachel Saitzyk and private citizens, many of them Beach Road residents with scientific expertise, including Todd Winkle, Jon Hirsh, John Norton and Steve Wishstar.
Chilkat Valley News reporter Will Steinfeld contributed to this story.