A torrent of icy water poured into the basement of Diane and John Lohrey’s home in Juneau, Alaska, in the early morning of Aug. 6, 2024. It entered with such force that it floated the piano across the room and overturned bookshelves.
“That water was cold,” Diane Lohrey recalled this August, a day before the annual flood was set to flow once again through Alaska’s picturesque capital city.
Every summer for the past 15 years, a glacial lake in the mountains outside of Juneau has burst through the ice dam that holds it back. At first, the floods downstream on the Mendenhall River were barely noticeable. Then, something changed. In 2023, the flood rose higher than ever. The following year, the river slipped its banks and swamped the Lohrey’s house, along with about 300 others.
Then in 2025 — for the first time — a new system of expensive flood barriers went up. But they barely held the water back.
“Am I being foolish to think that all the work that was done is going to protect us?,” Diane Lohrey asked on the eve of this year’s flood.
Warming temperatures around the world have destabilized ice sheets from the Andes to the Himalayas, often with catastrophic results.
Unlike a flood triggered by sudden rainfall, glacial outbursts in Juneau are predictable, said Eran Hood, an environmental scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast. As the weather warms each summer, an enormous basin formed by a retreating glacier fills with water. When the pressure becomes too great, it starts to float the glacier, and up to 16 billion gallons of water start gushing underneath it, flowing downstream toward Juneau.
“It starts as a trickle and ends as a torrent when that subglacial channel is probably the size of a subway tunnel dumping water,” Hood said.
An ‘overwhelming’ wait
Juneau resident Ann Wilkinson Lind said the annual outburst is like “a slow-moving bullet.”
She lives at the edge of the glacier-fed Mendenhall River, where a new flood wall blocks most of her river view. In 2023, she watched her neighbor’s home get swept downstream. “We had their clothes and trusses from their house stuck in our trees in the yard,” she said.
Her husband, Jeff, died a few days after the 2024 flood while he was cleaning up debris in the yard. “It’s just so overwhelming,” she said of the annual flood. “You’re just waiting and waiting and waiting.”
Across Juneau, residents say the wait is agonizing. Once the water starts spilling from the basin in the mountains, it takes about 48 hours for the flood to peak downstream. In the meantime, children jump on their backyard trampoline oblivious to the danger or ride bikes on a street that may be underwater the next day.
“I am very stressed. I kind of feel it in the pit of my stomach,” said Katie Koester, Juneau city manager. As the river slowly rose last month, she urged families in the flood zone to evacuate.
Juneau’s riverside neighborhoods are increasingly girded for battle. This year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed more military-grade barriers along the river and extended them higher, up to 16 feet in some places. Many homes in the evacuation zone have barriers right up against their living room windows.
Federal, state, and local governments spent just under $50 million this summer alone to protect the Mendenhall Valley from flooding, according to the city. Those expenses have continued to mount. A drumbeat of natural disasters, including record-breaking snowfall last winter, have strained the city’s budget, said Mayor Beth Weldon.
“Bring on the locusts, because we’ve had everything else,” she said. “Luckily, Juneau is very resilient.”
The city is considering a tax to help offset ongoing repairs to the flood walls and to help pay for a long-term solution. The walls aren’t designed to last the 20 to 30 years that scientists expect the outburst flooding to persist, Koester said. What people in Juneau really want is a fix that will end the floods for good. “We need to drain the basin,” the city manager said.
Drain the Basin
That task will fall on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency in charge of building infrastructure to fight floods.
Draining the basin to protect about 2,000 homes in the Juneau flood zone “would be a big effort, but it would not be outside the bounds of what the Corps is capable of,” said Brig. Gen. Clete Goetz.
Building a “lake tap” would require drilling a tunnel into the mountain surrounding the glacier, allowing the water to flow out before it fills up. A solution like that could cost $1 billion and take a decade to finish, according to early government estimates.
Unsatisfied with that timeline, local gold miners with experience drilling in the area, stepped up this summer to say they could do a lake tap in less time and for less money.
Brian Erickson, an executive with the Hecla Mining Company in Juneau, said the initial estimates to build a tunnel seemed “highly ridiculous, based on my experience. It just didn’t make any sense.”
Erickson said a lake-tap tunnel could likely be completed within two years.
That kind of feedback from local experts got the Corps’ attention. The agency is collecting proposals from industry and it plans to pick a contractor by the end of the year.
“I’m going to look at what’s proposed,” Goetz said, “and we’re going to be incredibly aggressive.”
Alaska has some of the fastest-melting glaciers on the planet. When the ice is gone, the floods will stop on their own. Scientists like Aaron Jacobs, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hydrologist who closely tracks the Juneau flood, say a problem caused by a warming climate will eventually be solved by a warming climate.
“We’re talking decades if we just let nature run its course,” Goetz said. “I believe the people of Juneau need something sooner.”
Flex and adapt
In the end, the flood of August 2026 was not as high as forecasters expected, and the damage was minimal. The glacial outburst was, however, still the fourth largest on record in Juneau, said glacial scientist Eran Hood.
Two weeks after the Juneau flood crested, a melting glacier collapsed in the Himalaya and sent a biblical torrent of ice and water roaring through mountain villages in Nepal and Tibet. As a warming climate destabilizes ice sheets around the globe, it’s creating new hazards that people in Alaska and beyond must learn to live with.
Juneau resident Don Habeger said he chose to “stay and fight” to protect his home and spent more than $200,000 to build an earthen berm around his property. After the 2023 flood, Sam Hatch went into debt to raise his family’s riverfront home four feet off the ground.
“There’s not a lot of homes in Juneau, so if you have to walk away, you’re looking at renting for 10 years,” said Hatch, whose home was untouched by this year’s high water.
However, next summer, people who live near Juneau’s glacial river and towering mountains will be put to the test again.
“It’s still a really beautiful place. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile that it can be so pretty and then one day it just shows up and freakin’ ruins everything,” Hatch said. “But I think that’s nature. A lot of what people do is they try to fight nature, and I think we’d be a lot better off if we flexed and adapted.”
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KTOO’s Alix Soliman contributed to this report.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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