August 15, 2025 Special Assembly Meeting

I will call the special assembly meeting for August 15th, uh, to order. Madam Clerk, will you note the roll, please? Our first item on the agenda is, um, our resolution. So, Madam Clerk, will you please read the title? Yes, and, um, Madam Mayor, if I may note for the record, all members are present.

And we do have a quorum. Thank you. Resolution 4027, a resolution of the City and Borough of Juneau declaring a local emergency in response to the 2025 glacier outburst flood and a request for state assistance.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Madam Manager.

CBJ Charter 312(c) authorizes the assembly to call a special meeting to affirm the manager's disaster declaration, which was issued on August 8th, 2025. Resolution 4027 does just that. It confirms the disaster declaration and also requests state assistance. You'll recall that Governor Dunleavy issued the first ever pre-disaster declaration and did grant both state public assistance and individual assistance, and we have leaned heavily on that public assistance. I encourage you to adopt this resolution.

Uh, thank you, Madam Manager. Madam Clerk, did we have any people sign up ahead of time to testify?

Uh, no. All right, with that, we will move to the assembly. Um, Mr. Bryson.

Madam Mayor, I was— I'm muted. We can hear you. Oh, you can? Okay. Would you move the resolution, please?

I am trying, Madam— oh, um, I move that the assembly, um, adopt Resolution 4027, uh, flood declaration, and I ask for unanimous consent. Is there any objection?

Seeing none, that resolution is adopted. Um, before we get to public participation on non-agenda items, Madam Manager or Mr. Barr, um, I'm not sure which one of you, would you please give us an update on what's going on? We just had a public media briefing at the police station with the tribe and our other agencies, state and federal. So would you please give us a rundown on what's going on? I would be happy to.

I am going to try to share my screen. Brecken, I don't know, Madam Clerk, I don't know if you need to allow me to share my screen or if I— oh, there it is. I've just been out of Zoom for so long. So there we have it. All right, can you see my screen with the logos of our participating unified command entities?

Great, thank you so much. All right, so as you know, the City and Borough of Juneau, in collaboration with Tlingit and Haida and United States Coast Guard providing operational support, stood up an emergency operations center to respond to this event. I want to let you know that I have Ryan O'Shaughnessy, the CBJ emergency manager in my office, for any questions that you have and support. Sabrina Grubitz, the Public Safety Manager and also Incident Command for Tlingit and Haida, is online. You can see the long list of contributing agencies to the response to this event, but it really has been a phenomenal coordinated effort.

I will not take this entire time to go into detail on that or share all of those moments, but I do hope at some time we pause and take a moment to just acknowledge the tremendous amount of collaboration.

All right, so as you know, we issued an emergency alert on Tuesday for a filling of Suicide Basin. It crested at 8:00 AM on Wednesday morning. It crested just under 16.75 feet, so it crested at 16.6 feet. This is the graph that reflects that release, and there was no HESCO breach observed. So the HESCO barriers really did do their job and protect most but not all of our residents.

I want to go back a couple slides and just show you kind of behind, under the hood for our Emergency Operations Center. We had at any given time around 50 people working in the Emergency Operations Center and deployed in the field for a total of about 150 personnel, and that's a combination of Tlingit and Haida personnel, CVJ, Coast Guard, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and Transportation. So really an all hands on deck event. We stood up Floyd Dryden as an emergency shelter, had 7 members of the public shelter there. Most people sheltered with friends and family, but this image just is a reflection of the core team there at the EOC.

Lots of people to thank who I hope I get an opportunity to, and really want to thank the Assembly for supporting our position request so that we could have a dedicated Emergency Programs Manager. I don't think we could have armed this response without it, and also your support for communications. Our communications has really been phenomenal on this event, and that's because you've supported creating that division within the manager's office. So again, you're probably familiar with this graph of the event, and I don't know if all of you were— did what we did and what the Emergency Operations Center and watched the livestream footage from K2. There was absolutely phenomenal livestream footage with 4 different cameras active panning, so we all could watch the river.

And that was really helpful, not only for our own peace of mind and our own observations to have that real-time information, but safety of bystanders is really our huge vulnerability. We still have people getting on those HESCO barriers, we still have people in the inundation zone, and we are going to be working really hard in the future to do some educating on how dangerous that could be. And I do think that having that livestream footage kept people at home. And so again, not to start with next steps, but really want to emphasize that it is incredibly important for the public to stay out of that flood zone during an active event. So these are just a few images.

Again, you can see there you have Army Corps, Army Corps team on the left with CBJ staff monitoring how the HESCO barriers performed. And We did have seepage through the HESCO barriers, and so this image that you see shows seepage. We sent the streets crew in to help pump out behind Meander Way. When the floodwaters got too high, they had to leave for safety reasons. Immediately, when it was safe for them to do so, came back.

We had the highest amount of floodwater that we had behind the barriers was 2 feet, and that was there on Meander Way. So, you know, examining, you know, why we're getting that seepage, That's all going to be part of preparations for next year. This is just another image of the HESCO barriers. I mean, wow, right? You look at that and you're like, thank goodness the assembly made those hard decisions.

Thank goodness that our engineering crews and our Army Corps support were able to get that installed because it really is phenomenal. Let's see, I want to talk a little bit more about HESCO barriers, though they did hold. We did see a couple of areas where we did not have breaches, but we had damage. So we had tree strikes, one area in particular by Diamond Park, no water came through that tree strike, but it did damage the HESCO barriers. We had to go in with Super Sacks and repair that.

There were a couple of other areas where there were tree strikes. You know, we were one tree strike away from a catastrophic flash flood event. And we, you know, need to engineer for that. We need to look at that and, you know, see where we need to reinforce the barriers, where we need to repair the barriers, but also really encourage the public to not be near those barriers. I can't emphasize that enough.

Just some images of our volunteer teams. We do have a VOAD that's currently stood up. This image here is of the Super Sacks. They're used to repair the HESCO barriers when they fail. You also have in this picture Brigadier General Goetz, who is the really top command of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who has been and still is in Juneau watching how these barriers perform.

Senator Sullivan was able to really get us a tremendous amount of Army Corps support. So not only do we have our project manager team here, we have got the highest level of Army Corps eyes eyes on this project and, you know, making sure it works, figuring out how we can do it better. And we are a real test case for Army Corps on this. I have this slide here that is supposed to have a really great image, but that I will share with you at Monday's meeting. But we have a map essentially that demonstrates the damage to the HESCO barriers, and we shared that with the press this morning, just haven't been able to upload it to this, but we will, we will absolutely share that with you guys and make sure that's publicly available.

Just again, showing where some of our vulnerabilities are, where there was seepage. The other, the other image that I don't have in here that I wanted to share with you is the disaster assessment. So staff have been pounding the pavement, doing a disaster assessment of those homes, and Instead of me trying to repeat the number of homes, I bet you Ryan has them in his head memorized, memorized better. So I'm going to invite him into my camera window here to give you the— oh, it's like reverse. There we go.

And he'll give you a damage assessment. Thank you, Manager Kester. So to provide some clarification on numbers of homes affected, I want to start by first explaining the metrics by which we evaluate So FEMA classifies flood damage into 4 primary categories: affected, minor, major, and destroyed. I'm really happy to share that we do not have any homes that meet the destroyed classification, and we have seen much fewer homes that meet any damage assessment across the board than we have in past years due to the success of the HESCO barriers. So we had 16 homes that were— are classified and assessed as affected homes.

This means that they had some amount, some minor amount of water inside of their garage or crawl space, but not inside of the living space.

This amount of water is frequently able to be handled independently by the homeowner, does not require mass removal of insulation or other things, but there is some moisture that needs to be addressed. Homes that do see some water in the living area, but does not impact any mechanical or electrical systems, homes is classified as minor. So again, that's water inside of homes that does not reach the, typically the electrical outlets on a wall. We have 25 homes that were classified and assessed as minor. We do have 6 homes that have been assessed as having received major damage.

Major damage would be water inside of the living area that does exceed that electrical outlet threshold, but does remain on the first floor.

One of those homes was located behind the HESCO barrier system. That home is located on Meander Way, and the other 5 homes are in the View Drive area of those 6 major homes. Some other numbers that I'd like to share with the assembly: we did set up a flood information hotline this year to provide better information to the public. That hotline received over 100 calls from the public, and those are calls that did not go to 911 dispatch, enabled our 911 dispatch team to focus directly on emergent, real-life emergencies rather than answering requests for information from the public. So we're very happy that we were able to get over 100 questions from the public directly answered by volunteers within our EOC.

As Manager Kessler noted, the United Way and our VOAD partners have stood up an incident command post at Melvin Park and are assisting families with muck out and cleanup. To date, they've assisted over 8 families with removing wet insulation, removing vapor barriers, unstacking sandbags from in front of people's garage, and are actively and currently providing food for those affected.

Thank you, Ryan. So before I turn it over to questions, as I mentioned, we do have both of our incident commanders and Engineering and Public Works online for any questions. I want to just briefly talk about next steps. We, as I mentioned, will be doing an analysis of the barriers, the vulnerabilities, where they need to be reinforced and where they need to be repaired. And there will be a cost associated with that.

So one of our major data gaps right now is what is the cost of maintaining these barriers? Again, the Army Corps has been very engaged in that. We have tons of data from Alaska Department of Transportation. They flew continuous drone footage during the entire event. That meant they had 3 drone teams that were capable of not only videoing the event but also had thermal imaging, uh, flied all night.

All of that data is going to allow us to look at high water marks, uh, and, and really get a, a really good understanding of how, uh, the river is behaving. So we've got that emergent need of maintaining those barriers, then we've got the conversation with you and Phase 2 and what that looks like. And so my next job is to bring back to you Phase 2, you know, this is what we think you should do for Phase 2, this is what we think it would cost, and of course leveraging the support of our delegation to help us with those costs and, you know, help us with those issues that come with a project like permitting and the like. And then the long-term solution, right? I mean, I think that The HESCO barriers demonstrated that they worked, but I think they also demonstrated what an impermanent solution they are.

Not only are they vulnerable to seafish and tree strike, but, you know, that is just not a permanent infrastructure, and we need to, as quickly as we can, get to a long-term solution. And I think having Brigadier General Goetz here is really helpful with that. We have Senator Sullivan coming in tomorrow to be briefed by the team and, you know, plugged into where he can help and where he can continue to provide support. And I've already been on the phone with Senator Murkowski and Congressman Begich's office, who are also scheduling visits later in the month to figure out how they can support the city and borough of Juneau and the Tlingit and Haida in, you know, our quest to protect our community. You all probably noted that there's a tremendous amount of high-level national media attention.

I think we were on every single national news media outlet, from NPR to CNN to CBS, and also the BBC. So, you know, we are getting a lot of attention and it's in some ways a good news story, but also, you know, we're getting the increase in flow every year. So those are some of the next steps. Briefly want to touch on infrastructure damage. Back Loop Bridge has been damaged, the abutment to Back Loop Bridge, and DOT is working on repairing that.

They don't have an assessment yet for when that will be open, but they're working very quickly with their bridge engineers to do that. With that, there was the internet cable that was down and also a water line that was damaged. None of those— the water line, no customers were cut off from water from that. Of course, you're familiar with some of the outage issues with internet. It's affected even us at City Hall, but I know that crews are working on restoring that hopefully by the end of today.

So I forgot many things. I forgot to thank many people, and like I said, we're still kind of a little bit in the thick of recovery, so I will Would love to have an opportunity to share the story a little bit more detailed with you later, but I think that's probably all we have time for today, so I will hand it over to you, Mayor Weldon, to facilitate any questions. All right, thank you. And if we were trying to bring Sabrina over, so Sabrina, if you're on, can you raise your hand so we could bring you over, please? There we are.

And I just wanted to see, as the co-incident commander, do you have anything to add to anything that Ryan said.

Maybe she's having trouble with some of the connect— connectivity. So, all right. Okay, so we will go on to questions. Any— who has questions? Miss Bryson?

Thank you, Mayor. Miss Kester, what was the Army Corps' reaction about how well the HESCO barriers performed? Were they pleased with the performance? Did they have any— I mean, I know we learned from it, but what was their initial gut reaction, please? Yeah, I mean, the Army Corps was very pleased with the performance of the HESCO barriers and acknowledged that the city is going to need our continued support, and they, the various very highest level of Army Army Corps of Engineers has committed to continuing to support us.

Thank you, Mr. Brice. And Ms. Wall.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. You know, I couldn't really tell from the videos and the photos, but like in some places it looked like, you know, the water was pretty close to topping over. Is it, you know, do you have a, do we have a gut sense of like whether we will need— I know we'll need to add a lot of things to make sure there's no seepage and structural integrity, but to protect at the level we thought we were protecting, 18 feet, you know, do we have a gut sense of like some of these are going to need to be higher or not? We won't— we don't really know that yet. Madam Manager.

I have a gut sense, and my gut sense is yes. I also watched those videos, and it appeared to appeared like water got within 6 inches of the top and maybe even closer in some areas, but we are collecting all of that data right now and collecting all of those high-water marks. So I suspect that, you know, the barriers, when we went into this, we felt like our infrastructure that is put in would protect to 17 feet and the barriers themselves to 18 feet. However, we'd have flooding on the the areas that were not protected by barriers in an 18-foot situation. I think that's largely proven true but, I mean, we are going to have to reinforce and probably build up higher in some locations for the same reasons that you mentioned.

Only takes permits and money. Ms. Hall. Yeah, I'm wondering if the City is also aware that it's not just the internet that's out for a large swath of the neighborhoods back in the View Drive, Montana Creek Skater Cabin area, but it's also cell service, so virtually left without any connection to the outside world. We— I can answer that. We are well aware because it's all about— it's all through Back Loop.

I can't make phone calls from my house either. Okay, okay. Or at least a big chunk of Back Loop, and which is why—. So yeah, you mentioned, Katie, that, uh, that was hoping to have the internet restored by this evening, but would that be the same for the cell phone service? I'm sorry, I should have said the fiber optic cable should be restored, and that is the cable that all that information comes through.

Um, somebody had their hand up, but now it's lower. Miss Hughes-Scandies. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I raised it or lowered it just as Second, too quick. Um, thank you, Manager Custer.

This is all great. And just start with kudos to all staff and all the work that's been done. Really, really appreciate it. And eagerly look forward to hearing, you know, what the life, what the maintenance cost is going to be once you have more time to collect that. I was just curious off the top of your head, and I know you may not, it may also be too soon for this, but in those areas where we saw the seepage with the HESCOs, Do we think more HESCO will be the, uh, that we just need to throw more HESCO on it, kind of on the same vein as like the topping over?

Um, is that something that we talked about when we were talking about constructing in the first place, or might it have something to do with the installation in that area? I think—. Question— we don't have a good analysis on why we got the seepage. We did get the seepage in some of the, uh, kind of most the worst-hit areas last year. So, it probably has to do with the pressure of the water and kind of moving through those barriers.

But, haven't had the opportunity to do a full analysis. I don't think that, I don't think it's a higher barrier necessarily in those instances. Meander Way, a great example, right? That's one of our hardest-hit areas, even in, you know, before 2023. So, really, going to be leaning on the Corps and our project managers here to study that.

And just to add on to that, Chris Goins from the state said I think they had 15 to 18 hours of drone footage, and that will be very helpful too to gather information. So we have a lot of information together. Mr. Smith. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Um, I actually, I know there'll be further questions on a number of the things.

I know we're deep in response now, you know, questions on View Drive and the barriers and all these things. I guess I just have to really just put out an incredibly deep thank you and appreciation to our staff, to our many, many partners. I'm going to list them off, but I know I will miss some, but Tlingit and Haida, National Weather Service, USGS, I mean, just so many. I mean, it was just a huge relief to see how much, how many, I mean, obviously many people, a number of people, and many people are still impacted and feel for them, but just compared to the tremendous damage that was incurred last year, I mean, I just have to give a huge thank you to everyone involved in the preparation and the response, the planning. Again, always room for improvement, but just a huge thank you to everyone, Manager Kester and the team and everyone else, just Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your good work.

So I just wanted to say that. I don't know if this was the appropriate time, but I, I needed to say that. Um, thank you. Now, thank you, Mr. Smith. Uh, yes, you left off a few people, but I— one item of interest was the National Weather Service, um, ladies, uh, spoke at the press briefing, and she said the day of the flood, their website got 5,000 hits.

So that's pretty impressive. Mr. Kelly. Thank you. I think I have a similar vein to speak as the Deputy Mayor, but I think I can also tie it into a question because while he's absolutely right, a lot of our partners came together and really made this possible. I think we also owe a lot of thanks to the community and to volunteers at large, and the question I wanted to ask, I think you might have touched on it a little bit during your briefing, our What further opportunities are there for community members to volunteer and to help out some of the affected homes?

Yeah, thank you. The United Way is gathering that information and you can go to their website both to sign up for assistance or to donate funds or to volunteer and so they're, they're manning the voad for us and you're absolutely right, though a lot of homes did not get impacted. For those that are impacted, it's very real. We are organizing debris cleanup to help those homes and that will start on Monday at the request of the homeowners to give them some time to do some of that cleanup. So again, we're still working with, with United Way, working in the field to help those impacted homes.

Thank you. Any further questions?

All right, so just to add on again, thank you to all our partners that, as I said, the press concert from the beginning when we went to Washington, D.C. with the tribe to try and get money for all this, to all of your guys' hard work, to all of the work by everybody for the planning of the HESCO barriers, the implementing of the HESCO barriers, and the EOC, which was just absolutely amazing. So just thank you, thank you. However, Wednesday night we all got some sleep, but the preparations for oncoming is going. The basin, as we know, is already filling. Last year we had a partial release in October, and so we have to continue working with for a long-term solution.

So even as we assess the barriers and figure out how to fix some spots on them, we still have to be looking for a long-term solution. I don't see any more questions, and the clerks told me that there was no one there. Public will have a chance to talk. We'll do another briefing on Monday, and we'll have more public comment on them. So, Mr. Bryson, you have one final thought?

Yeah, Madam Mayor, ironically, while we're hearing the update here, I almost want to say this is Ms. Figus. She was asking about when cleanup time would happen for the houses that were impacted. Is it going to This is not her question, but is there going to be a specific time when, like, crawl space garbage or any water-damaged parts of the house, will there be a pickup day or some type of coordination for trash for the houses that were impacted? The short answer is yes. And do you want to let Mr. O'Shaughnessy do this, or do you want me to take a stab at it, Mayor Manager?

We'll let our emergency manager, uh, so he doesn't have to painfully listen to someone summarize what he knows like the back of his hand. Thank you for the question. Uh, so debris management operations will be beginning to be conducted in the field starting Monday morning. Because the HESCO barriers have largely been so effective, we are able to coordinate that much better this year, including but not necessarily limited to individual homeowner coordination. So Monday morning, we'll begin standard debris pickup from the right-of-way.

We also recognize that there may be an ongoing need in the coming weeks and potentially even maybe a little bit longer, and so we can coordinate that in a site-specific way with those affected homeowners.

All right. Anything further? Seeing nothing, we are adjourned. Hopefully those who are still stuck can make it home.