Glacial floods cause house to fall into river in Alaska
Homes in Juneau, Alaska, fell into the Mendenhall River due to flooding from a glacial collapse.
Floods from a glacial collapse ate away at a shoreline and caused at least one house to fall into an overflowing river.
A resident of Juneau, Alaska, recorded video of a white and gray two-story home at the edge of the raging Mendenhall River.
Part of the foundation of the home hung in the air above the water, as the river had already swept away the ground beneath it.
The house began to tilt toward the water until it fell in, with its roof sliding off first and the walls crumbling into a pile of debris at the water’s edge.
‘It was really sad to see, but all we could do was stand there and watch,’ Sam Nolan, the resident who captured the moment on video on Saturday, told ABC News.
A larger, three-story red building next to the light-colored home also had its foundation already hanging over the river, and was on the verge of collapsing too. It fell shortly after.
Juneau deputy city manager Rob Barr confirmed that two homes were swept away by the river and one more was damaged. He added that a condominium building was ‘significantly undermined’ and that a ‘handful’ of other homes were also at risk of being washed away.
Other residents filmed trees and other debris being swept away in the river.
The flooding was caused by breakage on a side basin of the Mendenhall Glacier, called the Suicide Basin. The flooding happens when a dam containing a glacial lake ruptures. The basin is located about a dozen miles north of Juneau, which is the state capital.
There was a less than 1% chance of such intense flooding happening on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) scale, according to National Weather Service Juneau hydrologist Aaron Jacobs.
‘We didn’t even think that this was possible,’ Jacobs told ABC News.
The Juneau residences collapsed more than a year after two beach houses in the Outer Banks in North Carolina fell into the sea after being battered by strong winds and waves.
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