Once again, we remind you that we cannot urge you to take action on our behalf without involving ourselves in the additional IRS paperwork hassles associated with lobbying activities, but this is the key information you would need if you should decide to act on your own.

This is the first of three pages in the Budget Information series, speaking first from the heart about why we do this work, the what principal actions the community can take, followed by a summary of the key budget details. The following pages detail the requirements for avalanche programs, the roles of nonprofits and government in solving the problem, and the contacts you need if you decide to help out.

Like Levees in New Orleans

In pre-Hurricane-Katrina New Orleans, those few specialists who understood the danger sounded the alarm, but they were largely ignored. If you asked most residents about hurricane and flood danger, they would have said they had lived there for all their lives without seeing any problem, so there obviously was none. There were few e-mails or phone calls to public officials on the need for better levees, and no one packed public meetings. Though hurricanes themselves are exciting, levees and preparedness were boring, mundane issues that failed to arouse public concern.

That’s because we as humans are wired to be good at evaluating and avoiding risks that occur frequently, but we do not do well at evaluating low-frequency risks with big consequences. We learn best when we consequences are immediate. But low-frequency high-consequence risks are usually just abstractions to us, not real enough to be felt at the gut level where our decisions are made, until it is too late.

Like hurricanes and floods, only those few who have been caught in an avalanche, lost a friend to one, had a lot of field training, scrambled through the devastation slides leave behind, or had a near-miss themselves understand the risk in a real way.

That is why the Avalanche Center exists. We have dug our friends’ bodies from the snow, twisted, broken, and cold. We have knelt in their blood, pumping on their chests, trying vainly to save them even when we knew it was already too late. We ourselves have been hit by walls of solid snow moving at freeway speeds, spun violently under waves of snow twice our height, wind knocked out by crushing weight, airless. We have felt cold terror as slopes gave way under us, swept up in the dizzying acceleration of an entire mountainside letting go at once.

We know from experience that having one friend killed in an avalanche is enough pain for any of us. None of us want to have to go through the trauma of digging out hundreds of dead and injured friends and neighbors after a large urban avalanche, nor do we want our home town to have to live with that kind of sorrow.

Juneau is to avalanches as New Orleans is to hurricanes and flooding. But urban avalanche accidents are entirely preventable. It's simple, all we have to do is not have people living in avalanche zones. And in the meantime, give people a forecast so they can make an informed choice, and a ready response so they might have a second chance.

That’s what this is all about. Budgets are just numbers, dry and devoid of life, but what they mean to us is the ability for people to take action that will make a human difference in the real world.

There are three principal actions the community can take to deal with the urban avalanche problem in Juneau:

1. The CBJ has commendably taken the first step by developing an avalanche response plan and training their emergency responders in urban avalanche rescue.

2. The second step is to provide avalanche forecasting so people know when to avoid the avalanche zones and so response workers know when to be ready and can make a quick call on scene safety. The CBJ began to take this step with the 2007-07 short-term demonstration program, but has not yet followed through by funding an ongoing full-season program.

3. The third step, a voluntary buyout of the properties in the avalanche zones, is the only practical long-term solution. The CBJ has begun to do this. Though it is the only way to eliminate the problem, it will take years to complete. The first and second steps are necessary until the buyout is complete. Once the houses are gone, structural defenses can be built to provide additional protection to the high school and highways. There are no technological fixes or structural protections that are practical until then.

The year 2000 Cordova urban avalanche is a good example of what happens when a 100-year event hits a housing area and there is no forecasting program to warn residents of the danger. This State Troopers photo was taken during the search. We have not had a 100-year or greater event on the Juneau urban paths since the houses were built. The 1962 Behrends Path slide was a much-smaller 30-year event.

We have found more funding that we can use for forecasting. In combination with CBJ funds, this would extend our forecast season to about half the season. We are exploring several alternatives that would allow us to forecast for the entire winter, but all options will require additional funding.

Key Forecasting Budget Points:

The Shortfall

The City and Borough of Juneau (CBJ) approved partial funding for avalanche forecasting in the 2007-08 season, but at $50,000, it is only 32 percent of the $156,096 minimum we need to do the job. The CBJ came up short by $106,096. Though this is a small amount for government, we as a tiny nonprofit do not have the funding sources to make up the difference.

Whose Responsibility is It?

The Alaska State Troopers are legally responsible for Search and Rescue in Alaska, but the CBJ is responsible for urban avalanche response in Juneau.

Lawsuits are virtually certain to follow an urban avalanche. The CBJ's best legal defense in the event of a slide is to show that we have taken all reasonable steps to mitigate the adverse effects. If we choose to not take steps which we could easily do and which other similarly exposed towns have taken, we as a community are wide open on liability.

We are liable from both the legal and the moral standpoints. Our longtime Alaska heritage and tradition has always been to pitch in and help our neighbors in time of need. If we cannot contribute so small an amount to help save lives, we have become sadly lacking in charity. We have a clear responsibility to help our neighbors. Morally and ethically, avalanche programs are the right thing to do.

Our home: downtown Juneau nestles among steep snowy mountains as the lights come on on an early winter evening.

Forecasting Is Cheap

The entire forecasting program would cost Juneau residents less than a hamburger a year. Each Juneau resident's share of the total funding would be $5.20. If the state and federal governments contribute their fair shares, each resident's share drops to only $1.67.

The urban forecasting budget is a pittance by any government standards. The total budget is equivalent to the cost of two low-end government workers, or one high-end worker. If a town that funds as many high-priced wants as we do cannot come up with so small an amount for a basic health and safety service, we need to admit that we have allowed selfishness to play too large a role in our lives.

View down toward Juneau from the NW edge of the Behrends Path.

Budget Breakdown

As any business owner knows, at least half of any budget goes to overhead. Half of $156,096 leaves $78,048 to pay the staff. Because we cannot work alone in dangerous avalanche conditions, we need two workers in the field. To provide 24-7 rotation, we need three field workers on staff. The fourth staffer manages the office while the others are in the field. Divide $78,048 by four workers and you have $19,512 each. You can't hire highly-skilled professionals in Juneau for any less, nor could they afford to live here on less.

Helicopter time and field workers are key budget components. While we use skis as the most practical and economical tools to travel and test with once there, helicopters are the only practical access to the upper slopes of Mt. Juneau in winter.

Budget History

None of these budget figures are new or surprising. In September of 1999, we issued a report on the status of avalanche programs in Southeast Alaska that estimated $145,000 for Juneau area forecasting. In a note to Governor Knowles in January of 2000, we refined the estimate to about $160,000. In a detailed statewide avalanche program budget developed at the request of the Department of Public Safety in February of 2000, the Alaska Mountain Safety Center (AMSC) in Anchorage estimated $176,900 for the Juneau area. In November of 2001, we reworked the AMSC budget using actual costs and estimated $293,860 for education and forecasting for the entire Southeast Alaska region, including travel to outlying communities and a program of web-posting field reports for the whole region. In November of 2005, we issued a detailed annual report with a figure of $201,555 for the Juneau area, including education and backcountry forecasting. In April of 2007 we submitted budget alternatives at CBJ request ranging from $156,528 for urban forecasting only, to a little over $200,000 for urban and backcountry forecasting, and around $300,000 to include Thane Road. They asked for the lowest possible budget alternative and we were able to trim the urban-only budget to the current bare bones figure of $156,096, as detailed in the 2006-07 CBJ Urban Avalanche Program Report, PDF File (7.1MB).

Another view of the year 2000 Cordova urban avalanche search effort. Searchers have cleared the roadway for access and are focusing their effort on a house with two people known to be missing. One was found dead and one, in an air space but with collapsed house parts crushing his chest, was saved despite going into full respiratory and cardiac arrest during extrication. Had they had an avalanche forecasting program, residents could have been warned of the Extreme avalanche danger.

Ten days after the year 2000 Cordova urban avalanche we flew over in a military helicopter on a rainy day while evaluating the risk to cleanup workers. Debris like was spread over the entire width of the path. It looked like a bomb had gone off.