City officials in Wrangell said they hope to collaborate with other Southeast communities to build a webpage that contains landslide risk information.
Acting borough manager Mason Villarma said he initiated the idea to the Petersburg and Haines City Managers.
“Why not partner with a neighboring municipality on this,” Villarma said. “I think that’d be an effective and efficient use of resources. Many of our citizens travel back and forth (to Petersburg) for work and sports, so I think it’s a good thing to pursue jointly.”
Villarma was in Petersburg in January, when the city hosted a work session with the Sitka Sound Science Center. Researchers there helped to design an online landslide advisory dashboard in Sitka. It designates landslide risk as ‘low, medium or high’ based on weather conditions. Villarma said that system could be a model for what Wrangell creates, along with Petersburg and other communities that want to participate.
Collaborating could possibly reduce costs
“Just kind of getting the ball rolling,” he said. “We haven’t gotten to meet all on the same call or anything yet, but we’re going to continue those conversations. I think just having us and WCA, ideally the Petersburg borough, Haines borough, with potentially their tribal entities or local tribal entities, would be a great pool of resources.”
Villarma said collaborating would really reduce the cost of starting up the platform, although data collection streams would still be independent and require separate equipment.
“Further conversations will hopefully result in some buy in,” he said. “Our advisory system that we’re promoting would not look like Sitka’s explicitly. We’d probably have some nuances and probably wouldn’t have the color coded LiDAR. We’d probably just have a conditions assessment.”
For now, Villarma said that governments are cautious due to liability risks. More conversations are needed to see that all communities are open to sharing a platform.
