Ketchikan responds to landslide that displaced hundreds Thursday

KETCHIKAN, Alaska (KTUU) - The City of Ketchikan is recovering from a landslide Thursday morning that left hundreds of people displaced — no injuries or structural damage was reported, but the slide hit a road that connected the north and south areas of the island.

Alaska’s News Source spoke with a resident, Chelsea Haponski, who has children in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District, including a 5-year-old in preschool who was on the south side of Ketchikan at Fawn Mountain Elementary while she and her husband were home from work on the north side.

“Elias gets out of school first and they notified us saying, ‘Hey, there was a rock slide, our buses aren’t going to be able to get Elias where he needs to get to, to be dropped off. Is there anybody who can come get him?‘” Haponski said.

“At that time, I was like, ‘Well, at the moment, no, let me do some calling and see if I can find somebody who can pick up my 5-year-old.’ And so they said that’s fine. [The school had] a couple other, several kids that are in similar situations that [they were] just going to hold here at the school basically until [they] get notification from parents and there’s somebody who’s able to come pick all those kids up,” she added.

Haponski said she called her cousin who picked her son up and dropped him off at an Aunt’s house. Their other son was in school at Point Higgins on the north side, and Haponski’s husband was able to pick him up.

On top of trying to facilitate getting her children home, she also had to get her father-in-law to the airport.

“The only way to get to the airport is via the ferry across the channel. And that of course was on the other side of the rock slide,” she explained. “And so I had to reach out to a friend of mine who worked over at the airport and had a few other people who also notified me that there was a gentleman, Greg Johnson, who was running people over to the airport.”

Haponski connected her father-in-law with Johnson so he’d make his flight home to Pennsylvania. But that wasn’t the only water taxi the Haponski family received help from.

“My other cousin, he had to use an Allen Marine tours to get from, he was over here on the north end to get back over across town. And then he was able to grab his boat,” she said. “We didn’t want to put our five-year-old on an Allen Marine tour boat by himself, and there were so many people waiting, that for one of us to try and get on going one way to then get to Elias and get him back, that my cousin said, ‘OK, we’ll just get our boat.‘”

“He said, ‘As soon as I get back, we’ll grab Elias and then we can bring him over to you guys.' So they took their boat and brought Elias to us on this side at the same marina that we had dropped off my father-in-law,” she said.

Haponski said she was feeling pretty good about the situation until she picked up her son from her cousin’s boat.

“We got him off the boat and got him back in the car,” she recalled. “Then I got a little bit more emotional, like, ‘Oh my gosh. This could have gone totally different.’ But no, it definitely was a blessing to have family here in town.”

On Friday morning, Rodney Dial, the Ketchikan Borough Mayor, said things were looking up.

“It’s a pretty good day. DOT (Department of Transportation) has been out early this morning, they did a site survey,” the Mayor said. “Some excavation has started taking place. So far, so good.”

“We’ve got a couple of real big boulders up there [that] we’re a little bit concerned about. If those were to go down the hill, it could potentially take out our power for the community so that’s a big concern right now,” he added.

He’s hoping at least one lane will be reopened before Friday’s end. In the interim, schools and businesses remain closed.

Remembering back to August, when a fatal landslide struck Ketchikan, Dial said his community was ready to respond to this event.

“I feel that the first event really helped the community prepare for this latest one,” Dial said. “Our EOC (emergency operations center) was brought online extremely fast [Thursday] night, the public responded very well. I think for the most part people are actually prepared in this community to deal with the short-term emergency and it was just amazing to see everybody come together.”

“The people that transported individuals from the north end to the south end and vice versa. I mean, this community is just doing a great job coming together and dealing with this issue that we hope will be resolved really soon,” he added.

While it was an emotional experience for Haponski, she said her son was none-the-wiser to the event taking place.

“He was excited because they put on a movie in the preschool room, so he got to watch Moana and he was like, ‘we got to watch a movie. It was awesome.’ He goes, ‘I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, because Auntie Kim picked me up,‘” Haponski said.

“And then he got to go over to my aunt’s house and he goes, ‘but I got to play with the dogs and I got to give them treats and I got to have a snack and potato chips’, and he was playing with the Nerf guns, he was totally happy,” she added.

She said that her family is all together at home, waiting to hear the latest from the media and local authorities.

“[We’re] staying off the roads and just hanging out because again, school’s canceled. So most people, if they don’t have something urgently that they have to be at, they’re just staying home today and probably over the weekend until that road is cleared out,” she said.

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