Residents living in avalanche-prone downtown neighborhoods got the all-clear to return home Wednesday after the city lifted its last remaining evacuation advisory this morning.
Mary Amor was finally preparing to leave Juneau’s emergency shelter at Centennial Hall. She’s been staying there with her brother since last Friday, when the city issued an evacuation advisory 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. She evacuated with her brother because they were scared for their safety. Amor is in her 60s and is disabled.
She said living away from her home has been stressful, but she was grateful to have a safe place to hunker down.
“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. She says more than 50 people used the shelter over the six days that the risk of large avalanches loomed over downtown neighborhoods and Thane.
“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.
The Red Cross plans to close the shelter on Thursday morning.
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.
And he said he’s glad to be back.
“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 is an avalanche advisor at the City and Borough of Juneau. He said that the city didn’t decide to lift the evacuation advisory lightly.
“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 miles per hour 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.