This article has been updated to clarify a statement by View Drive resident Malachi Thorington.
Flood-impacted Juneau residents expressed frustration about city leaders pursuing a short-term HESCO barrier levee, viewed as achievable by July, instead of seeking long-term solutions during a meeting Friday night as the midpoint of a seven-week response period for the proposed levee nears.
Several residents said they would rather pay for flood insurance and take the 2025 flood as it comes rather than pay up to $6,292 for flood barriers that are expected to last five to 10 years.
About 125 people attended Friday’s meeting at Thunder Mountain Middle School, where City and Borough of Juneau officials discussed the proposed establishment of a Local Improvement District (LID) that would require 466 property owners to pay about $6,300 each for installation of the HESCO barriers along the Mendenhall River.
Juneau has experienced disaster-level glacial outburst floods for the last two years, both reaching peak levels Aug. 6. Last year’s flood damaged about 300 homes in the Mendenhall Valley after reaching a record-breaking 15.99 feet, exceeding the previous record of 14.97 feet set in 2023.
City Manager Katie Koester said the goal is to have the barriers installed by this July, with March 3 as the target date to start construction. The latter is exactly one month after the Juneau Assembly is scheduled to vote on an ordinance authorizing the LID.
However, glacial outburst floods are unpredictable and a release from Suicide Basin could happen anytime. Suicide Basin experienced a second full release in October 2024, resulting in minor impacts. Another release is not anticipated through the winter due to colder temperatures, according to the National Weather Service Juneau’s monitoring website.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is recommending and providing the HESCO barriers — which are three feet square, four feet high and have interlinking metal frames — with CBJ responsible for the cost of installing, maintaining and disassembling the semipermanent levee. In a series of “Tetris maps” showing blocks of neighborhoods, officials at Friday’s meeting showed how the first phase of barriers would be placed along a two-mile stretch of the river, with the full levee expected to be up to four miles long and remain for up to a decade while a more permanent solution is implemented.
At the neighborhood meeting, Juneau residents asked what would happen if the HESCO barriers fail.
“The HESCOs are a flood emergency barrier,” said John Bohan, CBJ’s chief engineer for capital improvement projects. “We would still be recommending evacuations from the valley and from the projected inundation areas based on the projected flood elevation. We’re not going to encourage anybody to stay in that area. We have advanced measures, we have better communications, we have better ability to provide that. We’re going to use it. If it fails, it’s because you did not heed the warning to evacuate. It’s not because we didn’t warn you.”
“This is not the bulletproof barrier that you can stand behind,” Bohan said. “This is a temporary flood emergency barrier that we are going to recommend everybody evacuate from the area. This is not going to say you can live in your house through the flood. We still want you to leave and protect your stuff, and, as I said earlier, protect your own homes. Take your own responsibility for that.”
Michael Records, a USACE civil engineer, addressed examples of where HESCO barriers have failed: when they have been placed on pavement or when water has been against the barriers for weeks.
Records said the HESCO barriers along the Mendenhall River would be placed on native soil or where the native soil is weak, and placed on compacted, small ripraps so they have a firm friction surface to hold them in place.
“One advantage of this unique situation is that the flooding here is pretty fast, so those concerns about water just sitting against the HESCOs for a long time and creating sand boils are less of a problem than would be other places where HESCOs have failed,” he said.
On Dec. 16, the Assembly reduced payment by impacted property owners from the originally proposed $8,000 to no more than $6,292, based on the city paying 60% of the cost rather than 40%.
The payment for the barriers can be paid in full, or over the course of 10 years at a 4.78% interest rate per city code.
Renee Culp, an Emily Way resident, requests city leaders consider not charging interest for flood barrier payments. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire)
Renee Culp, an Emily Way resident, said she is OK with paying for the short-term barriers, but on Friday asked the Assembly to reconsider the interest since it feels like profiting from victimization.
“I think that figuring out a short-term solution is a really good idea while they’re figuring out a long-term solution,” she said. “I think that our Assembly has done well in listening to the experts and finding the solution that has been identified for our specific needs. I feel extremely grateful to my neighbors on the waterfront that are going to have their properties impacted for the rest of the valley.”
The 466 property owners have until the Feb. 3 Assembly meeting to formally protest inclusion in the LID and if most do so the Assembly would need eight of its nine members to approve the ordinance establishing the district. The eight-vote requirement will be triggered if objections are filed by property owners representing at least 51% of the total cost of the LID fees — which is more complex than a simple majority since four of the property owners will face an extra $50,000 charge for protection measures and thus equate to about nine “votes” apiece.
Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said if that happens, the Assembly will have to decide if they want to override the vote, not pursue the flood barriers, or find a different path, which would be funding the project entirely out of the city’s general fund. Two Assembly members told the Empire last month they are unlikely to vote for the LID if a majority of residents formally object.
“I definitely heard a lot of desire for more information, information that we don’t yet have from the community tonight, and I totally empathize with that,” Barr said. “I wish we had more time to have more studies done to be able to gather a lot of that information and present it. Unfortunately we don’t. We recorded this meeting tonight, so we’ll be looking back at that recording and seeing if there’s anything that we can grab to inform the work that we’re doing.”
A red line shows where the temporary flood barriers would line the Mendenhall River. Emily Way and Sharon Street were unaffected in the 2023 flood. (Screenshot from City and Borough Local Improvement District presentation)
Rick Perkins, a resident of Killewich Drive, said he initially supported the HESCO barriers, but has since shifted to advocating for a levee at Mendenhall Lake. He said the city needs to take the same action they took during cleanup and recovery efforts in August.
“We have enough engineers in this town to do this,” Perkins said in an interview after the meeting. “If we have to start buying fuel and getting the excavators up there ourselves, we can have an open rebellion if that’s what we need to get this levee built. It’s ridiculous that they’re tying everything up in studies. They want to study, they want to study, they want to study. Things never happen when you do studies. We’re spending way too much money on studies and not anything on action.”
During last year’s flood response “they cut the red tape,” he added. “They hauled the stuff away. The National Guard came down and helped. That’s the kind of action we need.”
While Perkins said he now favors the Mendenhall Lake levee since it’s a permanent solution rather than a stopgap measure using HESCO barriers, CBJ and USACE officials have stated repeatedly in recent months a lake levee isn’t practically or legally feasible by this summer.
“A levee is absolutely a viable solution,” Koester said in response to multiple residents suggesting a levee during the question-and-answer period of the meeting. “It needs to be studied, and it needs to get through that study and design process, and we know that’s going to take time. I don’t want to lose the valley and all of those homes, hundreds of homes, while we study and permit a long-term solution. The Assembly has decided and my conscience has decided as well, that I don’t want to lose all those homes while we wait for that long-term solution, which is why we’re working on this short-term solution.”
Juneau residents line up in the Thunder Mountain Middle School auditorium on Friday to ask questions and protest the HESCO flood barriers that are potentially being installed this summer. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire)
Mark Miller, who lives on Long Run Drive, also asked the city to consider pursuing a long-term solution before the next flood instead of installing the barriers. Instead of a levee at Mendenhall Lake, he suggested widening and straightening the river at what’s been referred to as the “fishhook.” Miller said the river has naturally widened and straightened from previous floods at the Vintage Park oxbow and below the Mendenhall River Back Loop bridge, with flooding upriver reduced as a result.
“If you don’t cut a spot through that fishhook you’re going to get a lot more water coming from where it jumps over Killewich,” he said. “I walked out from my property to Riverside Drive during the peak of the flood and it was probably an average of three feet deep from the end of Long Run Drive. And then by the time I got up to Riverside Drive it was about a foot deep. You’re going to condense a huge amount of water to come down to this fishhook, which is already flooding.”
Bohan said moving the water through overflow relief channels is a long-term solution that will be studied, not only at the fishhook, but also further upstream.
“The challenge is, and this is where the experts come in, there are unintended consequences,” he said. “So where do we cut through the trees? If we cut through the trees right on the picture, we would focus the water instead of there right on house 3377 and then put a giant standing wave in their front yard. Unintended consequence. We are trying to study all of this and do it in a rational manner and use the information we have up front.”
Juneau residents at the Friday meeting also expressed concerns about the potential unintended consequences of the HESCO barriers. Many asked what the impacts would be on downstream or upstream neighbors. Bohan said that’s what the Hydraulic and Hydrologic Analysis would assess.
Another potential long-term solution suggested at the neighborhood meeting was dredging the Mendenhall River or pumping Mendenhall Lake. However, both are viewed as not feasible by July 2025 due to permitting and equipment needs.
Malachi Thorington, a View Drive resident, said he is willing to help pay for the barriers even though he is not a part of the LID. However, he and Elizabeth Figus both pushed the Assembly to update the Hazard Mitigation Plan and publish a flood map. It’s something they have been asking for since the first flood in 2023 that damaged their home.
“At this point in time, it’s unknown if we will qualify for flood insurance,” Thorington said.
Koester said the city has hired a contractor to update the hazard mitigation plan in the next year, and it’s important that it be updated as soon as possible.
“The Hazard Mitigation Plan is necessary to be eligible for certain grant programs,” she said. “None of those grant programs would we be able to apply for and get in time for this project. But it is our goal to get those, to get that hazard mitigation plan in place, to be eligible for future rounds of grant funding. Absolutely a failure on CBJ’s part for not having that Hazard Mitigation Plan update, but it is not impacting your ability to get flood insurance or access funds.”
On Dec. 20, the U.S. Senate passed the American Relief Act 2025. The legislation includes disaster relief funding with a specific provision supporting Juneau’s flood mitigation efforts after U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan advocated on the federal level. The federal legislation allows CBJ, Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, and federal partners to continue moving forward on a long-term mitigation solution in 2025. It directs the USACE to initiate a general investigation for high-priority studies of projects “including glacial lake outburst flooding.”
The investigation study, as mentioned multiple times throughout Friday’s meeting, will be the next step to long-term protection from glacial outburst floods. A short-term study is also being done by Michael Baker International, contracted by CBJ. This study will provide river modeling beyond the currently available 16-foot Flood Inundation Mapping and incorporate the newer changes in the river. It will also analyze and incorporate deployment of HESCO barriers and refine HESCO Phase 1 alignment. This modeling from MBI is expected in late February or early March.
Objections to the short-term LID must be received in writing by Feb. 3, 2025, at the next public hearing. Failure to object will be deemed as acceptance of the LID. Questions and concerns can also be sent to floodresponse@juneau.gov.
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz.garrett@juneauempire.com or (907) 723-9356.
An image with a red line shows where the HESCO barriers would line the fishhook in the Mendenhall River. Some Juneau residents in the area advocated cutting a new channel and widening the river to mitigate the flow. (Screenshot from City and Borough Local Improvement District presentation)
