Residents living in avalanche-prone neighborhoods in downtown Juneau got the all-clear to return home Wednesday after the city lifted its last remaining evacuation advisory.
Mary Amor was finally preparing to leave Juneau’s emergency shelter at Centennial Hall, where she’d been staying with her brother since last Friday. That’s when the city issued evacuation advisories for residents in all known slide paths downtown and along Thane Road.
“I know that a snow avalanche is nothing to play with,” she said.
Amor lives on Gastineau Avenue, which borders the city’s avalanche hazard zone and has seen multiple landslides in recent years. Amor, who is in her 60s and disabled, said she and her brother evacuated because they feared for their safety.
Living away from home was stressful, she said, but she was grateful to have a safe place to stay.
“It’s much a blessing, because there ain’t nowhere else to go out except outside,” Amor said. “This is a real blessing, them helping out the people that need it, in a time of need.”
Amor was one of 13 people to stay at the shelter Tuesday night, according to Britt Tonnessen, the community disaster program manager for the American Red Cross of Alaska in Southeast. Over the six days that avalanche risk loomed over downtown neighborhoods and Thane, more than 50 people used the shelter, she said.
“The partners that came together, I think, did a really incredible job and utilized the limited resources we have in Juneau, brought in what was needed and cared for people to the extent that we could,” she said.
Some evacuees stayed with family or friends instead, like Carlos Cadiente and his wife. Cadiente said he returned to his home in the Behrends slide path Sunday night after looking at the remaining snow on Mount Juneau and deciding he felt safe enough.
“Oh it’s a relief,” Cadiente said. “I’m happy that the big one didn’t come down. I mean, nobody got hurt.”
But now, he said his basement is flooding, and he thinks it’s because some of the shingles on his roof are too short to shed water away from the house.
The Behrends neighborhood evacuation advisory ended Wednesday morning, after the advisory for all other neighborhoods, including Amor’s, ended Sunday evening.
John Bressette, an avalanche advisor for the City and Borough of Juneau, said the decision to lift the advisories was made cautiously.
“I think people can feel good about going back to their homes,” he said.
Concern grew again on Tuesday due to winds forecasted to reach as high as 60 mph overnight.
But Bressette said the city’s new radar system did not detect any new avalanches on Mount Juneau overnight. On Wednesday morning, drone flights showed him that previously undetected avalanches at high elevations had happened earlier on the Behrends slide path, then the rain and warm air melted a lot of the snow that would have made a large avalanche possible.
“Overall snow levels being reduced quite a bit by all the rain, especially in the lower elevations, where avalanches have a tendency to entrain more snow. There’s just not a whole lot of snow left for that to happen,” he said.
But Bressette said people in avalanche zones should keep ‘go’ bags packed in case conditions change.