A landslide cut a path down a steep, thickly forested hillside and crashed into several homes in Ketchikan, killing one person and injuring three in the latest such disaster to strike mountainous southeast Alaska.
The landslide Sunday afternoon prompted a mandatory evacuation of nearby homes in the city, a popular cruise ship stop along the famed Inside Passage in the Alaska panhandle. The slope remained unstable Monday, and authorities said that state and local geologists were arriving to assess the area for potential further slides.
Last November, six people — including a family of five — were killed when a landslide destroyed two homes in Wrangell, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) to the north. Torrential rains caused a landslide in December 2020 that killed two people in Haines.
“In my 65 years in Ketchikan, I have never seen a slide of this magnitude,” Ketchikan Mayor Dave Kiffer said in a statement. “With the slides we have seen across the region, there is clearly a region-wide issue that we need to try to understand with the support of our State geologist.”
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He said the loss of life was “heartbreaking, and my heart goes out to those who lost their homes.”
The landslide followed a weekend bout of rain amid an abnormally dry August, said Andrew Park, a meteorologist in Juneau with the National Weather Service. The weather service early Monday said Ketchikan had received about 2.6 inches (66 millimeters) of rain in about 36 hours, though rainfall totals at higher elevations nearby ranged from 5 to 9 inches (127 to 229 millimeters).
Landslides can be unpredictable, but this one occurred without certain other risk factors, such as high winds, Park said.
“There weren’t any of the big red flags we would normally see,” he said.
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Ketchikan is surrounded by the Tongass National Forest, a temperate rainforest that encompasses much of southeast Alaska. Landslides strike often in the region, but garner little notice when they hit remote, unpopulated areas.
But as climate change intensifies storms and destabilizes soil, they are posing more risk to communities.
Because of the steep terrain, there’s limited room for development in the region, and cities and roads are built at the base of slopes. Increasingly, landslides are occurring in inhabited areas of “old infrastructure that’s been built in harm’s way,” said Aaron Jacobs, meteorologist and senior service hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Juneau office.
“It’s just becoming more and more common that they’re impacting people,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs planned to travel to Ketchikan on Monday to study the soil composition in the area and try to pinpoint why it occurred when the area had been in a period of drought before the weekend’s rainfall.
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“We’re going to learn more about this and hopefully we can figure out what caused it and then we can move forward on it,” he said.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy declared an emergency for Ketchikan, while Kiffer and Ketchikan Gateway Borough Mayor Rodney Dial issued a separate emergency declaration. A shelter was set up at Ketchikan High School.
Two of the victims in Ketchikan were admitted to the hospital and one was treated and released. All other individuals were accounted for, the city and borough said in a joint statement.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many homes were damaged; the state transportation department was sending a drone operator to Ketchikan to help assess the slide.
Michael Robbins, the superintendent of schools in Ketchikan, said in a statement on social media that a dozen people were staying at the shelter at the local high school as of Monday morning.
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But people often stay with friends or relatives after such events, so it remained unknown how many were displaced.
Power was restored to some of the area by 8:15 p.m. Sunday. Other areas will remain without power while the landslide is cleared and broken power poles are replaced.
Landslides include debris flows often triggered by heavy rains. When logging or fire destroys trees, the loss of root structure can weaken soil. Rain that isn’t being sucked up by plants can saturate the ground, making it more likely to slide. Other types include creeps, which move slowly downward, and rock falls.
In Alaska, melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, earthquakes and pounding rains can all trigger landslides.
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Thiessen reported from Anchorage, Alaska. Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed.
A major landslide in the city of Ketchikan, Alaska, killed one person and injured three on Sunday, with the governor, borough mayor and city mayor have all issued emergency declarations.
The landslide came as a heavy rain front moving across Alaska and there are fears of secondary landslides to follow.
As a disaster was declared, 3rd Avenue, 2nd Avenue, 1st Avenue, and White Cliff Avenue were evacuated.
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The aftermath of a deadly landslide is seen in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Sunday, August 25, 2024. The governor, borough mayor and city mayor have all issued emergency declarations. The aftermath of a deadly landslide is seen in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Sunday, August 25, 2024. The governor, borough mayor and city mayor have all issued emergency declarations. Anna Laffrey//Ketchikan Daily News/AP
Homes and infrastructure were damaged by the landslide, the Ketchikan Gateway Borough and City of Ketchikan said in a joint statement Sunday.
Two people were hospitalized, with one was treated and released. All other individuals have been accounted for, the statement said.
Rain is forecast to sweep across the Northwestern U.S. (Source: Windy.com)
A potential secondary landslide area was identified to the south of the original slide location and crews were standing by, according to the Ketchikan Gateway Borough and City of Ketchikan.
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Mud running under pavements also created some sinkholes around the area.
Power was lost and restored to some affected areas by 8:15 p.m.
Other areas will remain without electricity while the landslide is cleared and broken power poles are replaced, the borough and city said.
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Up to 4 inches of rain is expected to fall in Alaska over the next three days. (Source: Windy.com)
Governor Mike Dunleavy announced a disaster declaration on Sunday.
“This afternoon I verbally declared a disaster declaration for the landslide that struck Ketchikan earlier today,” the governor said on X, formerly Twitter.
“All state agencies are directed to provide whatever assistance is needed. My thoughts and prayers are with the residents of Ketchikan tonight.”
Borough Mayor Rodney Dial and city Mayor Dave Kiffer issued a separate emergency declaration.
“Friends, is with a heavy heart we relay that a landslide in the city has taken a life, caused several injuries, damaged homes and impacted our community,” Dial said in the statement.
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Kiffer said the loss of life was “heartbreaking, and my heart goes out to those who lost their homes.”
“In my 65 years in Ketchikan, I have never seen a slide of this magnitude. With the slides we have seen across the region, there is clearly a region-wide issue that we need to try to understand with the support of our state geologist,” Kiffer said.
A Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Response specialist and a federal Department of Transportation personnel are expected to travel to Ketchikan on Monday, Dunleavy said.
“I have directed state agencies to make available all resources and staff for the response effort,” Dunleavy said, noting that the city was receiving assistance from the State Emergency Operations Center.
Ketchikan High School has been set up as emergency shelter with supplies, bedding, food, and other necessities, while schools will be closed on Monday.
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According to the National Weather Service, there is expected to be more heavy rain toward the middle of the week.
“The entirety of the panhandle can expect to see rain on Wednesday, continuing into Thursday.”
Ketchikan is Alaska’s furthest south large community, with a population of about 8,000.
Last week, foods in the indigenous Yup’ik village of Napakiak saw water levels rise over 3 feet, trapping numerous people in their homes, despite them being in elevated structures.
Elsewhere in Alaska, a home fell into floodwater caused by a glacier lake outburst.
Mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for parts of a landslide-stricken community in southern Alaska as city officials warn another landslide could wreak havoc nearby.
An initial landslide damaged multiple homes in the coastal city of Ketchikan, Alaska, around 4 p.m. Sunday, the city said in a release.
“A potential secondary landslide area has been identified south of the original slide location. Response crews are standing by,” the release advised.
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Residents in the at-risk area have been ordered to evacuate and a local high school is serving as an emergency shelter, the city said.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration following the landslide, the governor said in a post on X.
“All state agencies are directed to provide whatever assistance is needed. My thoughts and prayers are with residents of Ketchikan tonight,” Dunleavy wrote in the post.
The evacuation area includes homes along Third Avenue, Second Avenue and Walter Street, First Avenue and White Cliff Avenue between Austin Street and Nadeau Street, according to the release.
Frances Ella Fitz in New York City in the 1890s. (Wikimedia Commons)
Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
“I came to Nome in the late spring of 1900, a New York stenographer lured by tales of Alaskan gold. Coincidence, circumstance and plain luck had brought me there, armed with only my typewriter. And several years passed before I could decide whether that luck had been good or bad. There were times when it looked very bad indeed.”
So begins the 1941 book “Lady Sourdough,” the assisted autobiography of Frances Ella Fitz (1866-1950), Fizzy to those who knew her. After her father died, she and her brother, Albert, supported the family. As Fitz wrote, “My mother had never worked — had never so much as washed a dish — and both Albert and I vowed she never would.” Albert was a composer and sold songs, though his income was understandably erratic. Fitz was the family bulwark, supporting them with bookkeeping and stenography work. In her free time, she sometimes played the banjo.
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She was also a typist. Patents and prototype writing machines had existed for decades, but the first commercially successful typewriter entered production in 1873. This was the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, also known as the Remington No. 1. It not only established the “typewriter” as a term but featured a QWERTY layout, the direct ancestor of our keyboards today. By the 1890s, the typewriter was an increasingly common feature in American offices. However, the supply of people who could effectively use the machines lagged. In this gap, Fitz found steady employment.
Stenography, bookkeeping, typing and even the occasional banjo performance paid the bills but were dreary occupations. Fitz harbored a different, if familiar, dream. All she wanted was enough money to never do any of that again, to never do any work again. She declared, “I wanted to earn money in the business field — wanted fiercely to earn huge amounts, which I could enjoy while I was still young.”
The gold rushes of the frozen north captured her imagination as they did thousands upon thousands of others. In 1900, the favored destination was Nome, rumored to have beaches made of gold. The gold fever was a craze, a social disease, and Fitz caught it bad. In her defense, she had some slight familiarity with mining. As of the beginning of 1900, she worked for a mining company in Montana before the facility closed due to a fire, forcing her to return to New York. Yet, she worked there as a bookkeeper in an office, literally close but effectively distant from the mine itself. And she was ever so tired of it. “At heart, I wanted to pan gold,” she wrote, “to take my wealth right from the earth, not spend more weeks and months cooped up in a stuffy office.”
She lacked the funds for a solo adventure to Nome and so joined a company of like-minded fortune hunters, a common practice at the time. Every company member paid $400 to cover travel costs while outside backers financed the mining operations in Nome. Half the profits went to the company with the participants, including Fitz, splitting the rest.
The not-exactly-silent partner in the operation was Faust, Fitz’s small, brown water spaniel. Faust accompanied Fitz across the country, to Alaska, and throughout her adventures north. The steamer out from Seattle offered the first difficulty along the way. Per Fitz, “Dogs belonged in the hold, but I wanted Faust with me. At the height of the jam, I concealed him as best I could, hurried up the gangplank, and managed to sneak him into a storeroom on the hurricane deck, which had previously been fixed up as a place for some of our boys. Faust spent the entire trip in there.” In Alaska, Faust was an alarm, defender, companion, friend and relic from another world.
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The little dog endured the transition from urban to frontier life better than most prospectors, surviving and thriving. When the spaniel died in 1906, the Seattle Daily Times ran an obituary. She was a part of gold rush lore well known by locals, the pampered pooch done good. Fitz buried her in a Seattle dog cemetery near Beacon Hill.
Frances Ella Fitz in Nome with Faust circa 1900. (Wikimedia Commons)
Fitz experienced many new, harsh realities on her trip north, but her dreamy vision of Nome held until she finally saw the ugly reality. “When we reached the shore, we realized how crowded conditions actually were,” she wrote. “Tents and freight jammed the beach. We had difficulty even to walk at high tide. Waves broke just short of the tents and the piled cargo. I saw one man pay another ten dollars simply to move his small boat a little nearer to the water. So the other would have room to pitch his tent.” The marvelous-sounding concept of scraping gold off a miraculous beach had appealed to many other fellows and ladies. Her first two days in Nome included a flooded tent, a resultant cold, and an attempted sexual assault by the doctor summoned to treat her cold.
While the mining operation struggled to find its footing, Fitz begrudgingly took work as a typist for a law firm. Unfortunately for her, the lawyers she worked for were at the center of a claim-jumping scheme given legal cover by the crooked Judge Arthur H. Noyes. The widespread corruption of early Nome is, apart from the gold itself, the defining aspect of that rush. It is a central plot element in every movie about the Nome Gold Rush, including “The Spoilers” (1914), “The Spoilers” (1923), “The Soilers” (not a typo, 1923), “The Spoilers” (1930), “The Spoilers” (1942), “The Spoilers” (1955), and “North to Alaska” (1960). Two of those movies starred John Wayne.
After resigning from the law firm, Fitz’s trials on the Seward Peninsula continued. She rejoined her original mining company. There were blizzards, accidents and food shortages but never any money. She partially financed a telephone line to Nome and bought a share in a newspaper, but neither of these investments paid off. She also had a log cabin in Council, northeast of Nome. No laborers were available when she realized she needed a cellar for winter stores. She told reporters, “So I did the work myself, and the only tools I had to excavate with were a tin spoon, a trowel, and a dust pan.” When Fitz wrote in the opening of her book, “And several years passed before I could decide whether that luck had been good or bad,” this is what she was talking about.
After a couple of years of such mixed fortune, she received a fateful tip. Unknown to all the mining companies in the district, a portion of the profitable Ophir Creek was unclaimed, what she would call the Hidden Treasure. She filed her paperwork and invested thousands of dollars into the operation. Buried in debt, she almost lost it all. The nadir came in August 1902: one week to pay off the debt, or the mine would be forfeited.
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She wrote, “The week passed in a roar of water and a clatter of stones over the riffles of the sluice boxes and the clank of machinery. I was wet continually, but couldn’t even take time to dry myself.” After seven days, she had accumulated just enough gold to maintain ownership.
Other than an epilogue, the book ends here. It notes that she netted over $100,000 from the Hidden Treasure claim, very roughly $3.5 million in 2024 dollars after accounting for inflation. In 1906, she married John Sanger in Boston 17 days after meeting him. She made one last trip to Alaska with him, which did not meet to his tastes. With fortune obtained, marriage was her new adventure, and she sold her properties in Alaska. By the early 1910s, they were in the Phoenix area, where they opened the first dude ranch in Arizona. They subsequently moved around, a few years in California here, a few years in New York there, before Sanger died in 1930. After publishing “Lady Sourdough” in 1941, she wrote two novels before passing in 1950.
The VHS cover for the 1998 film “Goldrush: A Real Life Alaskan Adventure”
In 1998, Disney adapted her story for a television movie, initially broadcast as part of The Wonderful World of Disney. “Goldrush: A Real Life Alaskan Adventure” stars Alyssa Milano — of “Who’s the Boss?” and “Charmed” fame — as Fitz. Bruce Campbell — of his chin and “Evil Dead” fame — co-stars as the unscrupulous leader of the mining company she joined at the beginning of her adventure. In very broad terms, the movie is accurate. For a gentle Disney adaptation, the film does spotlight the general lawlessness and claim-jumping of early Nome. Fitz’s typing background, Faust, the Ophir Creek claim and other crucial details of her life are likewise showcased with something at least approaching historical accuracy.
In the little ways, the movie gets Alaska as wrong as possible. Though several sources claim the film was shot on location in Alaska, primary shooting took place north of Vancouver, in Canada. Anyone familiar with Alaska would not be fooled. Most notably, Nome is not a sheltered cove surrounded by hills and dense trees down to the waterline as depicted in the film. There is also a very clean, polite and historically inaccurate Wyatt Earp cameo, when he should have been drunk, gambling or fighting.
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The funniest moment of the movie is unintentional. During an arduous trek across the Seward Peninsula, one group member chops wood while Milano works nearby. The noise triggers an avalanche, both a myth and well-established movie trope. As the tumbling snow accumulates, Milano tries to warn her companion. He can hear her, if not clearly, but has no clue about the rapidly approaching wall of snow, ice, rocks and trees. When he turns back around, the apparently silent avalanche hits him with the suddenness of a horror movie killer doing a jump scare. Darn sneaky avalanches.
Overall, it is a very positive and pleasing film, a tale of personal perseverance mostly backed by the historical record. And Fitz would have absolutely loved it. In New York, she lived with her mother in an apartment directly underneath the mother of Lillian Russell, one of the most famous actresses of the era. When Russell visited, Fitz and her mother would peek from behind curtains, drinking in the stage star’s elaborate clothing, gems and general presence. Fitz’s own desires were simple. She wrote, “I wanted plumes and jewels and ease like Lillian Russell.” In a way, Milano provided that glamour, if a century later.