Nobody was injured in a small landslide in Ketchikan that dropped from a Hillside Road property on Dec. 1, unearthing approximately 4,000 square feet of a family’s backyard and sweeping about 200 feet down a steep, forested slope into Carlanna Creek.
The landslide did not cause any structural damage to the family’s home or outbuildings, but yanked a kayak, a canoe and some fishing buoys from their yard to the creek below.
Portions of unstable land on the family’s Hillside Road property continued to fall Dec. 2 and 3, although the house appeared to be stable, according to homeowner Robert Booth.
Another small landslide on Dec. 1 fell down the slope directly across the valley from the Hillside Road landslide, on the west side of Carlanna Creek beneath Vallenar Lane.
The Ketchikan area experienced 13.14 inches of rain between the evening of Nov. 30 and midnight on Dec. 3.
Booth said he heard the Dec. 1 landslide “rumble” at about 11:20 p.m. He said his “dogs started running around” inside the house that’s about 20 yards from the landslide site. “I didn’t get up because I didn’t think it was my property.”
Rather, Booth said he “assumed it was movement on Third Avenue,” more than a mile away from his home, where a large landslide tumbled approximately 550 feet down a steep mountainside into a downtown Ketchikan neighborhood on Aug. 25.
Bonnie Steinberg, who owns the Hillside Road home with Booth and has lived there for 22 years, said she assumed the loud, late-night landslide was an airplane.
Meanwhile, Amanda Bolton slept through the landslide as it fell behind the home where she grew up.
Bolton said that since the Third Avenue landslide struck Ketchikan in August, the potential for similar geohazards “is pretty much all you think about when it rains, and the dam up there” at Carlanna Lake, upstream from her family’s property.
Reader Comments(0)