Editor’s note: The story was originally written to commemorate the November. 22th anniversary of the 1937 landslide. The story was delayed after the deadly landslide hit Wrangell on November. 20.
A day or so after the deadliest landslide of Juneau rescuers were unable to believe in finding more survivors. They continued to work by removing muck from the 20-foot pile of rubble that surrounded what’s now South Franklin Street.
The steam and smoke spewed out from the pile of mud broken trees and boulders. Early that morning an underground explosion in the basement of an apartment building caused fires to continue to rage for a long time.
Water cascades spewed across Mount Roberts as people sloshed through the streets of flood, calling out for loved relatives.
A voice was heard from under the mud. The rescuer one of them an AJ Mine employee named Ernest Mattielli recognized the voice as that of a 3-year-old Lorraine Vaneli, the daughter of his colleague Joe.
“span” style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”I’m exhausted,” she said. “Why do you not come and pick me up.”
“Everything went dark”
Nov. 22nd in 1936 was a calm Sunday night in Juneau. It was pouring rain. It had been raining for weeks.
In the evening, Lorraine and her parents took on the torrential rain in order to attend an evening dinner. While they were leaving, Albert Shaw was at his grandfather’s residence only a few miles away.
” style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”We were reading with my brothers and mewell, I probably was reading an illustrated book at six years old, ” Shaw said in an interview in November 2023. “All at once the lights go out, and everything was into darkness. .”
Shaw -who has resided in Juneau throughout his 94-year existence is possibly the only person alive who has a memory of the night. However, at the time, he was not aware of what was happening.
The lights flickered on Matson Boarding House. Matson Boarding House, too which is located on South Franklin Street. V.A. Babcock mining engineer, was taking the bathtub when he heard a rumbling sound that was rumbling. The walls in his bedroom began to sway and sway.
He retreated and bolted his way to the front door, only to watch the porch swept away by the massive torrent of mud, which roared into the valley out of Mount Roberts. He returned and made a shrewd escape by leaping out of the window.
In the drizzle, he sat and was watching as the boarding home moved across the hill.
Below on the street below, a woman named woman named Mrs. J. Wilson made her own escape after “turning around, she saw an impressive concrete building in front of her. She described it as a massive pile driver, waiting to hit.” Two males pushed her away just enough to avoid her, the Alaska Daily Empire reported.
Albert Persson and his family did not have time to flee when their home on the third level in the Nickovich Apartment Building began shaking.
span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”I knew it was an actual slide. There were several before.” Persson wrote in an account that was published through The International News Service.
His wife and he were sat in a circle around their two young children while plaster fell upon them. The ceiling then collapsed and walls collapsed.
The span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”It was a strange sensation,” Persson wrote. “Like being in an egg and having something smash it. the egg. .”
All of the Persson family was saved alive from the rubble.
The slide took over the Matson House as well as the Nickovich structure, and two houses belonging to the family. The massive pile of debris – approximately 20 feet deep as well as 75-foot widestopped on the Juneau Cold Storage building, that was located just across from the present-day dock for cruise ships.
While it was happening, the slide toppled telephone lines as well as power cables, making the town dark.
“The massive waterfall of rock and dirt was roaring down the mountainside in its death mission and swept all around the cascade,” the Empire recorded.
Shaw’s father, who was a volunteer firefighter, was among the dozens of others who made up the rescue teams consisting of city officials and police officers U.S. Forest Service employees and sailors from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tallapoosa that was docked in the town.
The span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”They set a portion miners to work shoveling the muck because this is what they did,” Shaw said. “This required several days to clean it up.”
Babcock was one of Babcock was among them. He rented clothes from a close friend and returned to the site that he had been to near his death. The crews started to work under the glow of headlamps, headlights from fire engines and cars which lit up a grisly scene. Live wires caused fires and heavy rain continued pouring down while rescuers began digging.
23 people were swept into the slide. Some were left with bruises and minor cuts while others suffered more serious fractures or injuries. Gust Erickson, who lost his home, was “slightly crushed” when his stove fell across the room, and then pinned to the walls The Empire said.
He was married to Cora is buried underneath the collapsed chimney of his house. Cora was the first slide victim that night.
The span style=”font-weight” font-weight=”400 ;”>”Tragedy has hit the city,” was the headline of an article on the Empire the next day. “The forces of nature which we are constantly fighting for survival have overpowered the human efforts of an instant .”
Fifteen funerals
There were 15 deaths in the land slide. It was a national story. The Associated Press, the New York Times and local newspapers all the way from California from California to New England wrote stories about the devastation.
With the dawn of the morning on Monday, the public discovered that two other not fatal slides fell across the city, one of them on Glacier Highway and another in the vicinity on the Salmon Creek Bridge. The debris blocked traffic for several days.
The danger of slides remained in the relentless rain. Homes in the hillside on Franklin Street and Gastineau Avenue were nearly completely deserted.
It took the impromptu search and rescue team several hours to locate the first victims of the slide -The majority were buried in deep. The deeper they dug the more deaths increased.
“All of the corpses were bruised, cut and discolored, like they were being thrown through a massive grinding mill,” the Empire stated.
A smudge of red dress drew them into the remains of Lucia Hoag, who had attended a dinner party held at the Nickovich Apartments with her family. A few hours later, rescue workers found their husband’s body James and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Forrest.
The next day, the crews spotted an emaciated couple dressed in pajamas. They were Hugo and Hilja Peterson the couple who had been smashed in their sleeping.
Five days were required to get all those who were injured. Most of them, it appears, were immediately killed by the massive impact of the fall.
The local church held 15 funerals on the weekend. After the dead are laid to rest cleaning was a long time. Trucks for pick-ups, dwarfed the huge piles of debris, formed a line to take the mud away to various areas of town or dispose of it in Gastineau Channel.
The rain remained unabated throughout the year. After a week of the first slide, another shorter slide fell, prompting teams to stop their work to focus on winter.
The remaining debris during early spring but the trace of the slide was visible for a long time — a huge gap in the slope in which a cabin that had been just barely left unnoticed by the mud flow was standing on its own.
Its style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”That cabin was there, and I’d like to say that it was in the 50s, possibly until the 1960s” Shaw said. “And throughout the years there was not any basic development. There were some areas in the vicinity of Franklin, South Franklin, in which there were no structures .”
The street has been completely renovated. The site that was where there was once the Cold Storage Building stood is an empty lot, however the section between South Franklin Street and South Franklin Street opposite that lot is the center of Juneau’s tourist zone. On any given day of summer hundreds or thousands of cruise ship passengers walk through and out of gift shops along the street. Some of these gift shops are located upstairs.
“Juneau is built upon an incline’
“Juneau is situated on the side of a hill, and not just an area of rolling, but a massive mountain of hard rock encased in loose dirt and shale,” wrote Juneau resident George L. Webb, in the December, 1936 note to the Webb family. “The rainfall last month was 25 inches which is an incredible bargain for any century.”
As per Sonia Nagorski, a professor of geology at the University of Alaska Southeast, Webb’s article outlines the main elements that cause an landslide — the heavy downpour on a slope steeply which is covered by loose sediment.
Its style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”In Juneau we’ve built the kind of homes right on the edge of these slopes.” Nagorski said.
In 1936 the section in 1936 of South Franklin Street at the top of Mount Roberts was one of the most densely populated areas in Juneau. An incredible amount of rain fell on the slopes of the mountain in November. Two feet25.87 inches 25.87 inches was accumulated over the course of the month.
The span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”First one record is broken, and then another until all records are broke,” the Daily Alaska Empire published a week following the landslide. “Now that the meteorologist had tucked aside his book of records .”
The geology of Southeast Alaska is well-suited for rainy seasons. The majority of the time soils drain water quickly. However, if the drenching reaches at a certain level then pressure begins to build up beneath the soil, and then the solid earth turns into a viscous mixture of dirt and liquid.
It can also trigger the debris flow which is the most frequent type of landslide that causes destruction in Southeast Alaska — where the viscous earth mix with trees, boulders and other debris while it is pushed down the slope.
Four inches of rainfall fell during the 24 hours prior to the slide of 1936.
span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”It’s the intense rain events that occur on top of conditions that had been damp for a few days -and they’re the most dangerous,” Nagorski said.
In Wrangell this storm which led to the tragic November. 20 landslide, drained the city with three inches of water over 24 hours. More than one-inch fell in less than six hours before the slide.
and human-caused climate change is creating heavy rains more frequent. Most of the largest, most lengthy rainfall throughout Southeast Alaska comes in tropical fronts referred to as atmospheric rivers. These are increasing in frequency.
Other landslides that have killed people in the past — like the slide of 2015 Kramer slide at Sitka along with in 2020, the Beach Road slide in Haines occurred in record rainfall, caused from atmospheric rivers.
As the region becomes more humid, landslides could increase in frequency, too. They have been occurring for a long time throughout Southeast Alaska, and in Juneau.
In 1920, a massive debris flow fell on Gastineau Avenue, destroying 16 structures, including a boarding house three houses and a dozen tiny cabins. The debris flow killed four people.
A second Gastineau Avenue slide caused the destruction of a home in 1929.
In the weeks leading up to that Nov. 22 slide, a slurry of debris ran across Mount Roberts and across Gastineau Avenue which smashed through the rear to the Alaska Hotel, damaging two homes and burying a woman, who escaped.
A slide series downtown
Some blamed the slide shows on AJ Mine, which cleared trees and ran it’s mill in the ridges of Mount Roberts.
In 1920 In 1920, in 1920, the AJ Flume overflowed just before the fatal slide. The overflow was over snowmelt and more than two inches of heavy rainfall over 24 hours. Geologists later would say that the overflow from the mine was not the cause of the slide in itself.
Gust Erickson, along with another two men that lost homes and wives during the slide of November 1936, filed suit against AJ Mine, claiming that the company failed to properly maintain the slope. A crack deep in the soil beneath the flume was noticed during the slide. It is possible that this was the cause to the slide, however geologists would later discover that the slide began more than a mile up the ridge.
Even after the mine shut down in 1944, slide falls from Mount Roberts kept happening. In the month of October, 1952 Three more slides came down on Gastineau Avenue and South Franklin Street following a raging storm of rain. They destroyed two homes, and fell within or very close to the same tracks that were used in the 1920 and 1936 slides.
Albert Shaw said he’s been following avalanches and landslides in Juneau in the past since the day he first witnessed the destruction in the area of South Franklin Street in 1936.
The span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”Stuff has rolled out of the hill several times. It’s now reportedly slowing down. However, that can give an illusion of security.” Shaw said.
While Juneau hasn’t seen an accident in the past since 1936 Shaw thinks that’s only luck. Shaw has spoken at city councils about the dangers of mapping hazards during the last few months calling on the city to enforce more security measures for development in areas of slide.
Last month it was the Juneau Assembly voted to eliminate hazards maps and development restrictions in zones of landslides.
Nagorski the geologist told us that we don’t know the exact date when the next catastrophic slide could occur.
Its style=”font-weight 400″> ;”>”They don’t necessarily adhere to an established pattern of time that is similar to an even interval,” Nagorwski said. “It’s feasible that an incline won’t be able to continue for more than 100 years, or even fail within the next few atmospheric river .”
However, the most likely places for major slides, she explained, are already known.
If a landslide occurs, it alters its slope and the plant life, and the flow of water through a hill. This can make the slope vulnerable to more slides. If a slide is brought down the flow of debris may be able to take advantage of natural gullies which can funnel it downwards down the slope. It can also draw channels formed by slides before it.
“So the areas in downtown, or during Juneau — where you’d expect debris to flow to be would be the places where it’s occurred in the past,” Nagorski said.
“And the spark of life was released’
For the men who were searching the rubble of 1936 the sound of Lorraine’s pleas for help sounded like a dream after more than 48 hours of digging through the rain and most importantly, discovering bodies crushed. A swarm of terrified and panicked rescuers set about to dig her up.
The span style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”Faster more rapid, put the shovels in the air,” said the Empire. “Hardened and tense men who had often tangled at death were sent into exuberant highs of energy after they heard that squeaky voice calling out “Mother.'”
In this moment that of Lorraine’s mom, Delia Vaneli, had already been found. Her father Joe was found deceased a few days later.
It took rescuers over three hours to get the toddler. They found her huddled 10 feet below in a tiny air pocket within the rubble from the Nickovich apartment building, only a few hundred yards from the site where is the city’s downtown Juneau library is located today.
The workers following their rescue by Lorraine Vanelli on Nov. 24 on the 24th of November in 1936. (Frederick K. Ordway/Alaska State Library Historical Collection)
Lorraine was awake and active However, she had been held on her back for two days and was severely injured. A wooden chest was thrown over her. Hands of the left were crushed and wedged under a fallen beam. Her legs were swollen and burnt by the underground flames.
She was wearing a jacket and ski pants to keep her warm during the chill of November as well as she wore a pink silk gown and a strand of gold beads she’d attired in to attend the dinner event. As Mattielli escorted her out, Lorraine pushed her mop of curls away from her face and revealed large brown eyes. She did not cry, the newspaper said.
The patient was taken to the nearby St. Ann’s Hospital, where doctors tried to help warm her up and treat her wounds. She died just two hours afterward.
Its style=”font-weight 400 ;”>”The shocking and awe of being in the slide was greater than what was feasible for a child of three to endure.” The Empire wrote. “And the tiny spark of life was gone. .”
This Juneau residents perished in the slide of 1936.
- Forrest Beaudin, 14 years. He is a student of Juneau High School and his mother is Lucia Hoag.
- Pete Battello, 54. Director of the North Transfer Company.
- Cora Erickson, 64.
- James Hoag, 40.
- Lucia Hoag, 42.
- Callie Lee, 38.
- Lena Peterson, 48. She is a seamstress in Snow White Laundry in Juneau.
- Hilja Peterson 47. Store owner.
- Hugo Peterson, 46. Store owner and a member of the Coast Guard Tallapoosa crew.
- Pauline Lott (Latt), 55. A dressmaker.
- Oscar Laito, 65. From Sitka.
- Marie Mattson, 58. Proprietor at the Mattson Boarding House, and spouse of the jeweler Fred Mattson.
- Delia Vaneli (Giovanele) Unknown age.
- Lorraine Vaneli (Giovanele), 3.
- Joe Vaneli (Giovanele), 30. Electrician and maintenance person for Gastineau Hotel. Gastineau Hotel.
