After heavy rainfall turned into deadly, destructive landslides in early December, Haines residents are now wary of heavy precipitation. A local forecaster came up with a tool to allay those fears with science.
Erik Stevens is usually concerned with snow—he leads the Haines Avalanche center. But after last month’s weather event put his home on the landslide evacuation warning list, he started paying more attention to rain.
He isn’t the only resident concerned when it starts to pour, so he created an online tool that measures local rainfall against the amount of rain that fell during December’s storm.
“It’s added a little bit of confidence for me, just that I don’t have to worry so much,” he said.
“It’s not raining anywhere near as much as it did during that record event that we had in in early December. So, you know, if a big storm comes in and the numbers start creeping up, then you know that there might be some cause for a concern in some areas. But so far, we haven’t seen anything close to what happened in December and I don’t really expect that we will, to be honest.”
The Haines Precipitation Tracker measures rainfall from the Haines airport. The tracker posts data in increments from the last six hours, the last day, the last two days, and the last week.
Since Stevens made the tool available online, it has garnered roughly 200 hits a day.
You can take a look at the Haines Precipitation Tracker here: https://alaskasnow.org/haines/rain.html?fbclid=IwAR3UTyGop-8iY4YpuGx3M_1p37QbxSS. njc96MYLTC77_1nx1cvcs0mfK3LA
