Haines, Alaska, continues long recovery from late 2020 landslides

More than a year and half after the Haines landslides, organizations, both local and out-of-state, are still helping to repair damage from the dozens of landslides that occurred around the borough.

That recovery work has evolved over time, said members of the Haines Long Term Recovery Group and other organizations involved in recovery efforts.

"When we got started immediately following December 2020, a lot of organizations came together to figure out how we were going to address the impacts to people's homes and living," said Sara Chapell, a member of both the LTRG and Southeast Alaska Independent Living. "We'd never faced anything like this before."

The landslides, driven by unusually heavy rain, killed two, but were scarcely limited to that, said Sylvia Heinz, coordinator for the LTRG. Smaller landslides around Haines cut off roads, washed through houses and entirely destroyed buildings.

Heinz said there's roughly 50 cases the LTRG's still dealing with, with issues ranging from damaged foundations to broken doors and windows, washed out culverts, driveways rendered impassable or physical or water damage from sliding debris.

During the initial response, the Borough of Haines focused its response on infrastructure projects that would be paid for or reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, (FEMA) while other organizations focused on individual homeowners, said Harriet Brouillette, tribal administrator for the Chilkoot Indian Association. Organizations had to scramble to help out individual homeowners while the borough government focused on different projects.

"We sat down and said, let's figure this out. Let's see what we can do. We worked with (Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska) at first. We organized our staff according to their disaster recovery org chart," Brouillette said. "We had federal highways funding. That enabled us to help out with driveways. That was day one. No one else was doing it. We had to step up."

The division of what the borough would focus on and what would be left to other organizations was one of the early issues, Chapell said.

"The borough made it clear that they were only going to be participating in projects they could get FEMA to reimburse them for," Chapell said. "We had to scratch our heads and say, what falls into that FEMA basket and what does not."

Haines, a town of less than 2,500, lacked the manpower to work on any more than the most crucial functions in the wake of a major disaster, Chapell said.

"We're talking about rural Alaska. Haines Borough focused on what was most important, that the public infrastructure was safe. When a small municipality works on disaster recovery, it can't work on other stuff," Chapell said. "I think Haines is really good at response. We're a giving community. We come together and there's extraordinary generosity in this community. But I don't know if we've ever faced a disaster of this scale and had to grapple with it."

Since then, the LTRG and Chilkoot Indian Association have been working on helping residents with damages sustained during the landslides, Heinz said.

"Each organization has a different piece of the puzzle for the recovery," Heinz said. 

Team Rubicon, a veteran-founded volunteer disaster response agency, has been involved since relatively early in the process, said Brandon Callahan, operations manager for the team's rebuild program, a long-term recovery program based on helping to overhaul buildings seriously affected by natural disasters.