It is that time once again for a First Things First podcast, and we have had so much going on in Juno these past couple weeks. It only makes sense to bring in Don Habiger, executive director of First Things First, Frank Bergstrom, president of First Things First, and we had to bring in the Dows, longtime Juno Whites Valley residents, and it's the perfect segue into talking about the flooding at Suicide Basin, which is bound to happen again, Don. And I saw your name in the paper for that as well. So you were hit by this. I'm gonna hand this over to you because, well, I know this hit really close to home for you.

Absolutely, Dano. This is a big issue for Juno. And I'm gonna take a a step back and just remind the audience that the First Things First organization is a five zero one(three) nonprofit and we are focused on a strong economy. And affordability is a community discussion that is going on now. And so the question is, do we feel safe?

Is our economy affordable? Especially given the twenty twenty five glacier outburst flood event. And finally, are we there yet? So, we're going to cover those topics through personal story and with some data. So I look forward to this conversation and let's go on and continue.

And Frank, I'm going to pick on you first. If you want to just add some of the data with your extensive background in river morphology, I would look forward to that.

Yes, fluvial geomorphology, that's what we're talking about here. That's a mouthful in itself. We've got to remember that we've got the type of flood that occurs throughout the world, oddly enough, fairly commonly, but never right in the backyard of somebody's town. We have a what's now being called a glacial outburst flood, but otherwise known as Jokulup, if you little bit of Icelandicism as you, and that's where, the glacier dams up a valley, fills a pool of water, then gets out of the way and lets all the water out in a big flood. And it goes through a very short river, Menenhall River, from the lake out to saltwater, and unfortunately, that is the only flat piece of ground in Juneau, and that's where we have built our houses.

And so somehow, all this has to live together. So there you go, that's the problem. We have a phenomenon that is not rare in this world, but it is extremely rare when it comes to being in a town's backyard.

Well, you, Frank. One of the things that I noticed is that the 2025 flood set a new record. And if we're looking at records, the last three years we've had a successive string of records. So in 2023, the Menorhall Lake level, which is kind of where they measure these floods, at least as far as I know, we had 14.9 feet lake level which created a new record. In 2024, we had 15.99 feet lake level.

And in 2025, we did it again, 16.67 lake level. So we have increasing flood level. What's more important is just sort of the flow of water that rushes past my house and the Dow's house. I'm up river, they're down river. Let's just look at those numbers for a bit.

In 2023, we had 25,200 cubic feet. 2024, we had 4,700 cubic feet per second. I need to add that part. That's a lot of water. And then this year, ballpark estimate is 50,000 cubic feet per second.

That is super amount of water rushing past our houses and we are impacted. And a quick reminder, based on twenty twenty three to 2025, we have doubled the amount of water flowing past our homes. And so, with that, Cindy and Mike, I just want to ask about your experience on the downriver side and then I'll relate my upriver side and we will just talk about what we saw that night and then how we felt about it. So, Cindy or Mike, take it away.

Thank you, Don. First off, we have never flooded. Feel that this year we were more prepared to be one of the homes that flooded. We do sit low on Meadow Lane. Most people know we sit low on Meadow Lane, and there are multiple reasons for that that it won't go into right now.

But my heart goes out to you and to my friends that have flooded and seen water in their homes for the third time, a girlfriend that changed her son's birthday so that it wasn't celebrated while they were trying to repair their home. As prepared as we were, we stayed up all night. I watched the tide go out. I was so thankful it wasn't raining, and then the water began to crest. I don't know how much water that was, but it was much more than last year.

I don't know how to quantify it. It wouldn't stop. It also did something this year that we've never seen before. We and our neighbors on Alder Circle saw percolation for the very first time. Now, maybe we hadn't been prepared for it, maybe we hadn't looked for it, but it was the most surreal thing after a night of no sleep, thinking that maybe you've escaped to see water coming from places you've never seen water before.

And I don't know the hydraulics of that. I don't know if it's because we are lucky and sit on gravel, so we do drain quickly. But when the water began to come up, it would then recede. We'd never seen that before either. Came up again, receded.

Came up again a little higher. I stopped going in to go get coffee because now I need to watch the log that's in the yard and hope that it doesn't hit the deck. We would have lost structure. And again, I was fully prepared for that. We've upped our insurance.

We sandbagged. We cleaned the entire bottom floor with the help of friends. We were fully prepared to flood, but you think about it, and you see that water coming, and you know you're there's no way to prepare for that. I know insurance or know what you folks have been through. I am thankful for Hesco bags, but I don't think Hesco bags prepare people to see the entirety of the situation on what I know as a 7 Mile River, and I feel unprotected.

And this is the first time I felt unsafe.

Well, thank you for that, Cindy. One of the things that we know is that and you talked about earlier before the show, you called it your new lawn ornament, but that piece of wood that's sitting in your yard. Heska barriers were perforated by a tree at some point in time. I don't believe it caused any more damage. I don't think water intrusion was a great issue, but the fact that a tree came through Hesco barriers is a problem.

They kind of foretell that it is not a long term solution. So, Mike, did as far as trees coming by your place and kind of destroying or impacting surrounding area?

Well, when you've got a large pine tree with a big root ball behind it and it's being pushed by that kind of water, It it just comes down the river. It looked like it was going about thirty, thirty five miles an hour, and it would start to turn with the current, and the front of the tree would just crawl right up the riprap and into the woods or the Hesco bags or whatever there, and just plow right into it as far far as it could until the current would turn the root ball around, which would then twist the top of the tree into whatever it was. And now the root ball is gonna pull the tree and whatever it's tangled up in on the bank. And we've seen that happen two years in a row. And, I mean, it it just tore tore trees right out of the side.

It took big rocks right out just popped them right out of the riprap. I mean, there was no no stopping it at all. If it had hit a house, it would have been like a harpoon going through the side of the house.

Well, Mike, that is that's so true. The dynamics of what those big old logs can do and they're full length. They're from the rip, well, all the way to the top. They're 120 foot long. Oh, yeah.

And anybody right now can just go out on the tideflats and see that horizontal forest that's out there right now. And all those trees that were once standing up in Meninal Valley are out there in the tideflats just, you know, holding up birds.

Yeah. Well, if you've ever seen one of them get crammed up in there and then just snap, the whole tree just snap right in the middle because it can't do anything. It's reached its breaking point, but it sounds like an explosion. It's it's insane. The power that's there is just beyond, you know, which you can imagine.

Yeah. And I was just gonna step back when we were talking about the Hescos here just a moment ago and what the seepage that's coming underneath them. And so the purpose of the Hesco is to increase the head in the river and thus allow it to transport more water. But by increasing that head and they're sitting on top of the sandy gravelly soil, and like you were saying, Cindy, your yard drains quickly. Well, heck, that water goes both ways.

So it can come into the yard and it can go out through those same gravels. And there's nothing the is going to do about that. In fact, the Hesco is augmenting that process by increasing the head that's available to drive water through the soil and into your yard. So therefore the Hesco is they're not founded on any kind of engineered soil. They're just on whatever happened to be there.

It's all laid down by the rivers in the days of old, and so it's sand and gravel. And at some point, as that river erodes those banks away and they are sitting right on top of the bank, the huskies are just going to fall in the river. That means long term, every year, lots of maintenance.

Well, Frank, you make a good point. And I was listening to one of our assembly meetings. I think it was the special meeting that talked about our flood. And one of the things our city manager said is that this year's repair bill, just for the Heska barriers, is a million dollars. And then what I found really interesting is after she made that comment, she asked, How are we going to pay for that?

So there we are, again, with that affordability issue, and do we feel safe in our own community? And so, that's really what this flood is doing to our community and why we're talking about it.

To me, what I'm hearing from the community, many testimonials from people like Cindy and Mike, is that really I'm not qualified to say so, but I'm gonna call this PTSD, leave the D off the end, it's just post traumatic stress. Every year, you're building up to that event every year, and then you get maybe what, a day or two? What do you guys think? To feel like you missed the bullet that time, it just starts building up through the next year.

I also want to add that I feel the pressure from Department of Natural Resources. Our emergency permit was great when we were able to get it. Yes, we wanted to help. Yes, we needed to put that bank but it's not our property. We did it hoping that somebody would come down the line and take over and, hey, we've got you from here.

That didn't happen. We then repaired the bank the following year, '24, for another $35,000 we were bleeding money. We then got a new eight or nine page permit from DNR with entirely different language that actually points to protection of the neighborhood without the neighborhood having any input, without the neighborhood helping us with the cost. We could not agree to sign it. We asked to negotiate.

We asked the city what they thought, and asked them to take a look, and where were they in this process? But again, it came down to we had to refuse to sign it, because we cannot carry the cost of continually maintaining a riverbank that's not ours, whether it's to protect our home or the neighborhood. On top of that, we have Hesco coming down the river. I don't know what that's going to look like for our neighbors. I don't know what that's going to look like for a city right of way that's a huge dip that turns into our neighborhood boat launch when the water's hot.

I am afraid to lose our beautiful yard, but if it protects the neighborhood, which again, I'm not sure would happen with the percolation. But not only that, our view has already changed. Across the river, they've had to wrap their banks. We now see an industrial area that we never saw before. I don't mind them.

We know them. Long time Junoites were friends, but they too are on the map for getting Heska bags. I don't know how they feel about that, but it might work. However, had that one tree not speared their fence, if there would have been a Hesco bag there, I think we would have had a catastrophe. We would have had a tree across the river that created a strainer with these trains of trees that go by that hesitate around the corner.

If just one of them had gotten stuck as big as the trees were this year, we would have all been in trouble.

Well, the testimonials I've heard of, I think Mike, you were just discussing prior to our starting to talk here, that we're literally from inches of going over the top of the Hescos. And so it's any little thing like this that you're talking about, Cindy, where you get a log jam and you can back that water up a little bit over the top she goes. So all the discussion about the Hescos is still a short term fix. We managed to dodge the bullet in terms of major flooding this year. But how are we going to keep people in our community or how are we going to keep people feeling good about their lives and their homes?

And we need to move on in our feeling here at First Things First to that long term solution. And we need it now because a long term solution, sometime out in the future in the long term, is not a solution. We need it now. And I want to express our appreciation for the delegation, for Senator Sullivan, who has been pushing hard to get people in place in the administration that will work within the Corps of Engineers to get a solution done now. Mr.

Tell is now the head of the Army Corps of Engineers. He has appointed General Gotts who came to Juneau during the flood to look specifically at what's going on. We at First Things First have put together a paper or two or three about all the alternatives and that the dam around Minenhall Lake, not all the way around, but just across the broad front of the lake there and across the river to slow down the flood, store more of it temporarily in the lake and then let it out as the Lake Suicide Basin drains, so as to not have such a high peak flow and we can easily manage it then down through the river, save our neighborhoods. So that is the long term solution. Yeah, the agencies are going want to look at some options and whatnot.

We've already done that. We can talk to them. We know that that dam is the way to go and it's gonna protect everybody. We gotta get it done by next year.

I guess the real question is what is being done now? Now that the city has deemed this success, have they come talk to the Dow family at all? Who are they talking to about this at this point and what's being done? I just keep hearing more and more studies and I can't really get a specific number on how long those studies are gonna take, Frank.

Nor can we, But, you know, geotechnical, that's a big one. If you're gonna build a dam, you gotta know what the foundation is. Oddly enough, apparently, you put a Hesco on the ground, you don't need to know what the geotech is. But that aside, we wanna build a good dam, not a bad dam. We wanna build a good dam we can have a lot of faith in.

So it's gonna take some geotechnical work. You gotta drill in there, see what the materials are like, see if it's gonna pump water and have the seepage that we saw this year. That's very telling. If we had started last year, we'd be done now.

They got to study it more, Frank, more study.

And that's the point, Dan, that we're trying to convey to this community is that time to act is here. We have residents, that was our example, I'll just speak for our family up there on the North End. Even though we, like them, have put on our own barrier, the city has not offered any phase two help, nor were we any part of phase one help when we consider the Hesco barriers. So we've been trying to do it ourselves. And we've had some success.

If you look at the differential between the crest of that river and actually some seepage that did get into our property, it was I'm going to guess we were eight feet different. It was a huge amount of water on the outside and less on the inside. But we did not succeed fully and we had seepage and we ended up with, as far as the definition is concerned, a major damage to house. In other words, the flood got in there, it went over our electrical, low level electrical system, and that is considered a major problem. Yes, we are insured, yes, we will be fined, but the question always is, can the community sustain an annual hit like this?

And as Frank said, as First Things First has maintained, no, we cannot. We need to change the dynamics, we need our permanent solution.

You know, another anecdote came up today when I was talking with a contractor and he said, I said, you you your job as a contractor, you've always got work, and he goes, well, yeah, sorta, because he used to run a a crew of five and he's down to himself. He says, people don't quit moving out of this town, I'm gonna run out of work. So that's anecdotal for sure, but I've heard it from many places. A lot of people are saying maybe it's time to just pick up the bags and uproot and head out, and we don't want that. We want to sustain our economy.

That means keep our jobs, keep our people, keep our housing, make it affordable.

I agree with that. I think we I'm born and raised here. My mom born and raised here. My great grandma. I love our home.

We've worked hard. We've done all the right things, but I think we're really on the cusp. As a matter of fact, Don saw we are packing. We are throwing things away. We're ready to go.

I don't want to go, but this is it's gotten too expensive and it's gotten too heavy. And we are very blessed that we have the option to be able to say it's time to go. Now if I heard that something was going to happen, whether it's at Suicide Basin, because I keep saying it's not the river, it's Suicide Basin. If we were going to have a levee, I would actually entertain the idea of staying as expensive as it is. And I'm wondering if the delegation now, as engaged as they are, which seems new and fresh to me, Don Frank, do you think that with the severe damage to the Backloop Bridge, the severe damage to communications, that wasn't just Juno.

It was also Skagway and Haines? Correct. Do we have a little bit more pressure now? Will that move the needle at all? Will we get more attention now?

Well, Cindy, you brought up a great point. We have four bridges in the system of the Menenhall River. We have the back loop, we have the pedestrian bridge, and we have lower bridge. And we also have Montana Creek Walking Bridge. Three of those are out.

Can't go across the walking bridge, you couldn't do the back loop bridge, although I understand just today it reopened, and the Montana Bridge is closed. So that's three out of four.

And did you see the massive log debris hung up on one of the airport light towers?

Right, anything out there in the middle of the channel, and as that channel continues to row laterally and vertically, it's going to expose more of the piling, more of the water lines, sewer lines, communication infrastructure, which you just referenced, was lost on the back loop bridge there when the fiber optic cable was apparently severed. So we are talking about real impacts here. Senator Sullivan's office is on this. We can guarantee you that. They're very aware of what's going on.

Representative Begich's office, totally aware and very interested in being involved. And then senator Murkowski, we we she gave us an hour of her time on-site when she was here in town. I thought that was extraordinary. So I think we have a unification of the delegation here to help Juno out, and it's time to use that influence to convince the Corps of Engineers to find the fastest way possible, which means within the next twelve months.

We're talking about some positive things, Frank, so thank you for that. And one of the things that we hadn't seen before, but we have to recognize is Governor Dunleavy kind of pre declaring the twenty twenty five flood a disaster. And I think because of that, it got the state DOT out fixing that bridge. And I used to tell my wife that for the first time, we're at the end of the road. So if you have to go downtown, you have to drive all the way around Auk Bay through that little turnaround, and we are the last house at the end of you drive, and so we consider ourselves on the end of road.

But because of that disaster, because DOT got fixing right away, on the way here, I took a left, which was across the bridge, not quite done yet, but it was nice to see success. But the real question for us as a community is, should we tolerate fixing every year, spending more and more of state resources, community resources, personal resources on something that we know we can prevent if we work together. And I think that's the call for action.

Well, in the stat you gave earlier to show we keep breaking records every single year. And if history is to repeat itself, which we know it's going to and everybody knows it's gonna happen again, it could be more next year. And it's almost something you have to prepare for at this rate because of statistics that we were looking at from the past three years.

Dano, this is the most predictable flood perhaps on earth.

Here we are still studying it and trying to figure out what to do about it.

And those that have considerable experience studying this situation have at least opined, and I would agree with the opinion, that it will probably get a little bit bigger for the next few years, both in terms of volume and peak flow, because the basin gets a little bit bigger as the ice recedes a little bit and there's fewer icebergs in it, so that means there's more water in it. As the ice barrier reduces in size, it should probably, probably, now this is not a certain thing, but probably get out of the way faster. So Suicide Basin, I model this as a great big water tank. That's all it is. You know, it's not like a flood where it rains in the watershed and then it all runs off.

This is just a great big water tank and somebody pokes a hole in it every year, and then it drains. And it's a question of how big that hole is as to how fast it drains, hence how long the flood is and how how dramatic it is in terms of the peak flow. So all the pieces there are suggesting that at least for the next few years, get a little bit bigger every year. Don't want to be a naysayer or fear monger at all, but it is something to think about.

Frank, that sort of pours water on any hope I had. Again, the fact that we as a community, we as a state, we as a congressional delegation need to pull together. One of the things that is a concrete fact is that this is a federal land issue. All of this is occurring on federal land. The feds need to step up and take care of the flood that emanates through private property on their land.

So, I support the delegation getting involved. I support the corps helping Juno fix this problem.

I wanna throw this to Sydney and Mike real quick. What would you all like to see happen?

I'd really like to see more protection, maybe Hesco, but I don't think Hesco's the answer. So I'd really like to see the delegation just fire up the afterburners and get on a levee, something that will hold back the major flow of water. I don't know what that looks like. I'm not an engineer. But if this valley area could have more permanent protection than just kind of trying every year, then I think everybody would be safe.

Yeah. I I think that the solution is the levee too. And controlling the amount of water that comes out into the river. I think that's the permanent solution to it. And in the future, if you have more trouble, at least you got something set up and ready to go.

What I would like to see is the city show some more urgency. You know? It seems to me like the state and everything is now on board and they're pushing it, but I still don't feel the urgency from the city. I feel they're reacting to what's happening and not being proactive.

Well, we as citizens can step up and try to fill the void.

We're working on it. Very good.

I appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Also appreciate the flood groups here in the community that have shown so much support and so much engagement. I I've had people knocking on my door far more than city employees, and I really appreciate that. It does make us feel like we're a team and we're in this together.

You know, for those like ourselves that live on View Drive, it's sort of sink or swim. It is through neighborhood collaboration,

it

is through camaraderie, it is helping one another that we are swimming. But when it comes to official help, I think we're sinking out there because they haven't found a solution for ViewDrive and we are on our own and we know that.

And this really shows you today that there are two sides to every story. CBJ declares a success, but that could be subjective, especially to people in this room right now, where it could have been so much more with the Hesco barriers, but do we just keep stacking Hesco barriers on top of one another each year? That is not the solution that we've come to in this room right now. Two sides to every story. Is success truly success?

In a way it was, but in a way, we still have people out there that were affected by this. So if you want to volunteer, donate, anything like that, unitedway, seak.org is a place you can go. And we have all of that up on our social media pages and websites here at the Juno Media Center. And if anything has struck a chord with you today, because you heard some very personal and powerful stories about what happened with Suicide Base and for people who were actually affected by it firsthand. Don, I got to throw this to you right now.

How can people get involved with First Things First?

Thank you, Deno. It is fairly easy. Either go to our website or send us an email. And let me give you our website. So it is f t f a k wordfoundation dot org or email is the word firsttfincgmail dot com.

So easy to communicate with us and we look forward to that.

Get involved, reach out to them, and listen to more of these podcasts. We've been doing it for a while now. You can check out the First Things First podcast. Listen to any episode and this episode if you wanna re listen to it over at k I n y radio dot com. I wanna thank Don Habiger, executive director, First Things First coming in here.

Frank dropping so much knowledge, president of First Things First coming in here. And of course, Cindy and Mike Dow sharing your stories today. Thank you all so much for coming into the First Things First podcast.

Thank you, Dano.

Thank you.

Thank you all. Thank you.