By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
As the development of Sitka’s landslide warning system continues, experts want public input about the difficulties of insuring homes in landslide areas.
For Americans living in landslide-prone places, insurance can be impossible to purchase, Max Izenberg, an assistant policy researcher for the public policy think tank RAND Corporation, told the Sentinel today.
“Essentially, this is not just a problem in Sitka, but throughout the United States it’s really difficult for anyone to get landslide insurance… It’s not just unaffordable, it’s nonexistent,” Izenberg told the Sentinel by phone. “We’re trying to figure out and untangle some policy issues… I’m here to listen to stories.”
In November, city crews removed debris from a landslide that had blocked a street off Halibut Point Road. (Sentinel file photo)
Izenberg is in Sitka for the month to conduct research and speak with locals about the challenge of buying landslide insurance, which he said has been nearly unobtainable in town since the Kramer Avenue slide in 2015. Three Sitkans died in that event.
Izenberg also is working on a doctorate in a similar topic: earthquake insurance in California.
His month in Sitka is aimed at looking for answers to a critical question.
“What are potential options that might make sense for financing landslide risk?” Izenberg asked.
“It’s just not available,” he said. “Some people said that to buy a home… they are oftentimes required to purchase landslide insurance and oftentimes landslide insurance is unavailable in the private market.”
While it’s too early, he said, to offer definitive answers to the quandary of available and affordable landslide insurance, he noted that possible options are admitted or non-admitted insurance.
He’s also checking into less traditional forms of insurance, such as community-based insurance, which involves payments to a collective pool of funding
At the moment, Izenberg wants input from Sitkans about the landslide insurance market. Anyone with a story can reach him at izenberg@rand.org or by calling the Sitka Sound Science Center.
With a host of geoscience hardware already in place, the center’s executive director, Lisa Busch, told the Assembly Tuesday that, along with tackling the insurance question, the next stage of the landslide warning program is the public warning dashboard.
“In addition to developing a network that is collecting a variety of geoscience information, our team has convened community stakeholder workshops,” Busch told the Assembly. “Community members told us that they don’t want a siren-based alarm system that could be confused with a tsunami warning. Rather, they would prefer a digital dashboard.”
Data involved in risk assessment, she said, includes soil moisture, river flow, rain gauge data, and the National Weather Service forecast.
When the system is completed, Busch hopes for a publicly accessible risk threshold indicator.
“The idea is to develop a danger threshold like other places have for forest fire danger,” she said.
Looking back at extreme rain events in Sitka last October, Busch said, her team’s landslide risk evaluations seem accurate.
“We’re making some pretty good guesses, the landslides that happened at the end of October - we had 18 landslides in Sitka - our team predicted that… They thought that the risk of landslides was going to be very high,” she said in a later phone interview.
In the future as the globe warms, Busch noted, significant rain events - and therefore risk of landslides - are likely to rise.
“It seems to be working for events that of course we don’t want to happen, but we are expecting more moisture with climate change. And generally scientists are telling us that warmer temperatures will mean more moisture and more extreme rain events,” she said.
As the issue of insurance came to the forefront, Busch said, the Science Center requested more funding from the National Science Foundation to look into the situation.
“We’ve heard from city officials, planners, bankers, realtors, insurance representatives, and homeowners about the concern of not being able to get insurance for Sitka houses. So we went back to the (NSF) and asked for more funds to research this issue,” she told the Assembly.
And so Izenberg’s current research endeavors began.
Busch echoed his statement that the Science Center and RAND will work on insurance recommendations.
“The other thing we’re working on right now… is to look at the insurance issues and really drill down on what the concerns are, what insurance companies think about when they do or don’t insure places that have higher risk of landslides, and then come up with recommendations of what we can do as a community,” she told the Sentinel.
