Alaska Felt Safe From Global Warming. Then the Glacier Melted.
Reading Time: 4 minutesI Left California Because of Wildfires. Now, My Town Is Dealing With a Whole Other Kind of Disaster., What I hope people understand about the record flooding in Juneau., Alaska flood: I left California’s fires. Now, a glacier is coming for my town.
Thirteen years ago, I returned to my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. I’d been living in Southern California, an environment that, with each wildfire season, had become increasingly hostile to my lungs. Juneau seemed like the solution, a place where I could raise a family of my own. Nestled in the world’s largest temperate rainforest—where it rains on average between 90 and 120 inches a year—I could drink delicious water from the tap and breathe deeply in the pristine air. If all hell broke loose, we would be surrounded by plenty of natural resources with which to fill our jars and freezers and warm our homes.
Juneau lacks wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes, and due to the island’s breakup, there are no tsunamis. In a burning world, ours is rainy and cold. My hypersensitive, medically fragile body felt safe.
That is until the melting glacier came for the town. Specifically, this glacier:
Almost one year ago exactly, on Aug. 4, 2023, ice melt that had accumulated spilled out from the glacial lake at Suicide Basin. The overflow flooded the river, eroding the bank in a matter of hours—by some estimations, up to 150 feet of riverbank—undermined the foundations of multiple buildings, and swallowed entire stands of trees. It swept the home where two friends and teaching colleagues of mine lived into the river, and devoured the bank near my sister-in-law’s home. The historic flood was featured on the covers of major international publications, and in a viral TikTok video showing how powerful the water had become.
On Monday night, Aug. 6, 2024, Suicide Basin crested again. This time, the flood was even more devastating. Coinciding with a high tide that brought the river even higher, the water level surpassed the forecasted ‘worst-case scenario’ at 1 foot higher than last year’s flood. Some streets filled up with 4 feet or more of water. It’s estimated that hundreds of homes may have been affected.
One guy I talked to said his friend had been stuck in his car overnight as the ice-cold flood waters entered it.
A story reported by local news source KTOO described a family who saw water rushing into their home so fast they put their child on top of the refrigerator, which was floating. When they arrived at the city’s emergency shelter at Floyd Dryden Middle School, they were soaked with glacial water. In their quick exit, they had left their ‘ducks, a cat, a lizard, and a beloved pet dog behind,’ KTOO reported.
One couple narrowly escaped the flood by jumping out of their second-story windows to get to a raft.
A friend whose house flooded said that in the morning, the power was out, so a neighbor lent her a gas-powered pump. This repeatedly set off the carbon monoxide monitors due to the fumes. Any time she or her husband went inside, they held their breath. This morning her husband came down with a bloody nose.
‘With every moment of relief there seems to be a whole new concern,’ she said.
The Juneau community has wasted no time in posting pictures of found pets and items in hopes of reuniting them with owners. Businesses have been driving around offering food and free services. Friends, my family included, have been scrounging for fans, dehumidifiers, and sump pumps to lend to friends affected by the flood.
On Tuesday, just hours after the second flood of historic proportions, I took a ride in a de Havilland Beaver floatplane to tour over the glacier with my family. My cousin was in town and my mom had arranged the tickets to do some sightseeing before the flood had occurred. It felt incongruous with the disaster, but we went anyway. We flew into skies choked with smoke from the Canadian wildfires—I couldn’t escape the fires after all—and over glaciers and an ice field that are in the process of disappearing. I saw how the rock had been exposed by the shrinking glacier. The pilot later told us a dogsled-camp tourist attraction had been moved up higher due to melting ice.
The air got smokier as we flew over the ice fields. Then, we saw the bloated Mendenhall River, which had just hours before had damaged hundreds of homes and destroyed cars, and left people to lay their entire lives out on lawns, drying in the sun. I thought about how insurance won’t cover so much of the damage. The policies weren’t designed to protect us from all the tolls of climate change. Most of the affected homes were not located in flood zones, and likely didn’t have any kind of flood insurance.
I will not be safe from the effects of climate change in the Alaska rainforest. The signs had been there. Two summers back, I participated in a local event called Climate Fair for a Cool Planet. As part of the programming, I and others danced a silly little number at a waterfront park by a breaching whale statue, pretending to be tourists taking in the wildlife. But what stuck most with me was the climate expert who spoke.
He told us that using reusable grocery bags and buying electric cars is good, but won’t make much of a difference in the big picture. If we really want to make a change, we need to work on voting in leaders who will work to introduce legislation to combat climate change.
His words have stuck with me even now. If you’re still reading, by all means, keep driving those electric cars, doing what you can in your daily life. But most importantly, I hope you’ll help elect leaders who will commit to addressing climate change. My community in Alaska is only one of the latest places to be affected. We might seem far away to you, but we are part of the same world. And I can tell you what we’re thinking here: We can’t even imagine what the future will look like if we don’t take action now.
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