Alaska presenters outline community-based landslide warning network and urge steady funding

State Representative Rebecca Himshutt convened a Juneau "lunch and learn" where SLIP (the Southeast Alaska Landslide Information and Preparedness Partnership) presenters described community-driven mapping, monitoring and warning efforts aimed at reducing landslide deaths and damage across Southeast Alaska.

"We are the first in the nation to develop community-based landslide warning systems," said Lisa Bush, a consultant with Fairweather Cove Consulting and coordinator of SLIP, summarizing a multi-agency effort that links tribes, municipalities, federal researchers and local volunteers. Bush said the Sitka pilot combined mapping, rain gauges and soil-moisture measurements to develop a rain-intensity threshold that now feeds a public web app (sitkalandslides.org) showing low, medium and high landslide risk for neighborhoods.

The project grew out of several deadly and costly slides, Bush said. "In the last 10 or 11 years, we've had a lot of deadly landslides in Southeast Alaska," she said, and noted costly infrastructure losses, including a Haines road incident she estimated at about $34,000,000 and a Ketchikan slide that she said exceeded $2,000,000 in damages and has not been fully reimbursed to the city.

Di Johnson, a hydrologist who described herself as a former Forest Service scientist and now runs Community Collaborators, said the work centers on community engagement: "We meet with the communities, we learn about their concerns...and they helped direct what we did," she said. Johnson described installing handmade piezometers to measure subsurface water and training local youth stewards to maintain gauges and verify runout models.

Aaron Jacobs, a senior service hydrologist and meteorologist with the National Weather Service, described how NWS is integrating research into operational forecasting and site-specific hazard dashboards. "We try to make it so that it's very clear, and very right in your face when you go to it," Jacobs said of the color-coded hazard maps and one-stop web pages the NWS is adapting for communities.

Presenters emphasized that the hazards and suitable warnings are community specific. Bush said different places in Southeast face distinct threats — Yakutat worries about landslide-induced tsunamis, Skagway about rockfalls, Prince of Wales about the interaction of logging and slope stability — and added that local geomorphology and soil properties mean thresholds and alerts cannot be wholly standardized.

Speakers repeatedly raised the need for stable funding and systems for maintenance. "We have the expertise," Bush said, "but we need resources" — for mapping, monitoring, mitigation planning, response training and long-term maintenance of instruments and dashboards.

Audience members asked practical questions about Juneau participation, whether SLIP aims to become policy, and whether vegetation, snowpack or logging affect landslide risk. Johnson and Jacobs responded that vegetation and root strength can reduce risk in some settings but that clearcuts and certain biological disturbances can increase landslide frequency; they also said rain-on-snow or early-season melt can add stored water to precipitation and raise risk.

SLIP organizers described the partnership as an informal collaboration (not a new agency or nonprofit) with a steering committee that includes agencies and tribal representatives; they released a strategic plan for public comment and hold a monthly SLIP meeting on the last Thursday of each month. Presenters provided a QR code and a substack for follow-up information.

The session closed with organizers offering to answer follow-up questions; no formal votes or policy actions were taken at the meeting.