Murkowski will push for federal aid to help with hillside monitoring

Alaska's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, told community leaders she will push for federal funding to bolster monitoring efforts of hillsides out the road.

"What we need to have is greater monitoring and greater data that will help inform. That is something that I'm committed to working on," she said at a meeting with borough officials on Dec. 20 in Wrangell.

"How do you give people that certainty that your home sitting on the beach where you thought you were always safe, and now you're looking up at the hill wondering if you are?" she said. "Through the addition of more data on soil stability, we can provide some level of comfort and certainty for people."

The senator, who attended middle school in Wrangell in the 1960s, spent about five hours in town on Dec. 20, during which she toured the site of the Nov. 20 landslide at 11-Mile Zimovia Highway that killed six people and later met with officials at the Public Safety Building.

"The community and state have done a very good job in addressing the situation with the road. There's still a lot of work that needs to move forward, but it seems that they have that well in hand, but the present reality is that people are concerned about the security and safety in their own homes," Murkowski said.

The senator's visit to the landslide area included reviewing efforts by the Department of Transportation to rebuild the damaged section of the highway, as well as learning about drone flights and weather stations installed in the area.

She was joined at the meeting by members of Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department Search and Rescue team, U.S. Forest Service, police and firefighters, hearing their concerns regarding better communications coordination, road repair, environmental monitoring and increased access to mental health services to prepare the community for future emergencies.

Murkowski asked whether all needed resources had been made available for search and rescue efforts. Former mayor Steve Prysunka, who works with his scent-detection dog to search for missing persons, answered: "I think there's a systemic problem in Alaska, all of our resource concentration is done in major metropolitan areas for search and rescue. ... There're very few small communities a part of that group. Money typically flows to Fairbanks, Mat-Su, Anchorage and Juneau, and I think that the state is set up (under) the concept of 'They will come rescue us,' and what we know from our Wrangell experience is we rescued ourselves."

Prysunka said it would be nice to see more of a push to support search and rescue in small Southeast communities. "Because we can't wait (for outside help) and sometimes people don't get here as quickly as we'd like."

A week after Murkowski, Rep. Mary Peltola came to town Dec. 29 and met with borough officials at City Hall to review and discuss issues related to the slide. The following day, Peltola toured the site and met with survivor Christina Florschutz, whose husband, Otto, died in the landslide.

"I think that Wrangell is a real model for cooperation," Peltola said, "and it would be wonderful if the rest of America operated this way."

"The council and the community have been really clear that public safety is their highest priority," Peltola said at the City Hall meeting.

"This is what, in my opinion, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is designed for. ... One of the handicaps that FEMA has is there are so many more natural disasters than what they were designed for and funded for ... they're really operating on a shoestring and they're very understaffed."

Murkowski said it is important that the mental health needs of Wrangell's tight-knit community continue to get addressed after the Nov. 20 landslide, providing resources for all residents, from schoolchildren who may have lost a classmate, teachers trying to hold everything together, or first responders risking their own safety to search for survivors.

"Not everyone is able to absorb that (kind of trauma) equally or certainly on the same time frame, so how we can provide support services for this community in the aftermath of the disaster is another avenue of pursuit that I'm looking to," she said.

Though the senator said she would advocate for federal assistance for the community, she explained it will be challenging in the drawn-out congressional budget process, which already faces a Jan. 19 deadline to pass a spending plan to avert a partial government shutdown.

"The challenge that we have is that our appropriations process is not moving along readily. I wish that I could tell you as we approach the end of the year that we have finished our appropriations ... we have not," Murkowski said. "We'll be taking those up when we get back." Congress is scheduled to reconvene on Jan. 8.