LANDSLIDESAn Early Warning System for Landslides Protects Sitka, Alaska
A hard rain was rattling against the rooftops of Sitka, Alaska, as day broke on August 18, 2015. Just before 10 a.m., a hillside gave way. A river of mud, rocks, and broken trees surged down the slope and crashed through the subdivision.
A hard rain was rattling against the rooftops of Sitka, Alaska, as day broke on August 18, 2015. A city building inspector, William Stortz, watched the deluge and decided to run out to a new subdivision to check the drainage. Two brothers, Ulises and Elmer Diaz, headed that way, too, to finish hanging sheetrock in a new house there.
Just before 10 a.m., a hillside gave way. A river of mud, rocks, and broken trees surged down the slope and crashed through the subdivision. It took search crews several days to recover the bodies of Stortz and the Diaz brothers.
The landslide changed how people in Sitka looked at the steep hills all around them. It made them a little more fearful every time the rain picked up. In that, it was a harbinger of what many communities can expect as the climate shifts and the natural world shifts with it.
But Sitka, a town wedged between ocean and mountains, accessible only by boat or by plane, was not about to become a victim of its circumstances now. Working with researchers from RAND and the Pardee RAND Graduate School, it set out to ensure that the next landslide would not take anyone by surprise.
The grief was still raw when the community meetings started. In a town of barely 9,000 people, the three men who died in the 2015 landslide were not just names in the newspaper. The Diaz brothers, former high school athletes, spent their afternoons mentoring kids on the basketball courts. Stortz’s obituary described him as “deep and steadfast and difficult to fathom.”
Sitka had always lived with the threat of a tsunami sweeping in from Sitka Sound. A piercing siren was the signal for residents to run; the hills were their refuge. Landslides happened; tribal nations in the area described them in oral histories going back generations. But until 2015, the biggest danger was thought to come from the west, from the sound, not from the towering wall of hills to the east. What can we know about the risk? people asked in those earliest community meetings. And then, What can we do?
