PHOTOS: U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski stood on Ketchikan’s Third Avenue Bypass in a reflective safety vest with local officials. All around her, crews with heavy machinery worked to clear layers of mud and debris from the roadway. She looked up the collapsed slope and down at the devastation below from last week’s deadly landslide.
“After all these years and nothing happened – you got rain, you got wind – but now all of a sudden, this decides to let loose in a way that is so dramatic,” Murkowski said.
Local officials and those leading response efforts told Murkowski that the cleanup and geological surveying efforts after the Aug. 25 slide would likely take a long time. The senator said she thinks crews must still be running on adrenaline at this point.
“And you know it’s probably not going to be until everyone’s able to take a deep breath that you begin to feel pretty, pretty low,” Murkowski told those leading the clean-up efforts.