Some Juneau residents urged to evacuate as Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier releases floodwater

Residents in some parts of Juneau prepared to evacuate ahead of what could be a record surge of flooding as rainwater and snowmelt in a huge basin dammed by Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier started to flow downstream toward the capital city.

Officials in recent days have been warning people in the flood zone to be ready to evacuate. On Tuesday morning they confirmed water had started escaping the ice dam, with flooding expected into late Wednesday. They advised people in the city's flood zone to leave.

One couple said they’re encouraging their neighbors to evacuate, but plan to stay put after sending their kids outside the flood zone. Their three daughters, aged 11, 10, and 8, were sent to a friend’s house at higher ground Tuesday to make absolutely sure they’re safe.

“The girls are having sleepovers outside the flood zone,” said Sam Hatch, a civilian Coast Guard vessel safety regulator. “A friend from work has three daughters as well so we shoved them all in one house and they’re having a six-girl epic four-day right-before-school-starts sleepover. I really owe my friend for taking them.”

The Mendenhall Glacier is about 12 miles (19 kilometers) from Juneau, population 30,000, and is a popular tourist attraction due to its proximity to Alaska’s capital city and easy access on walking trails. Homes on the city’s outskirts are within miles of Mendenhall Lake, which sits below the glacier, and many front the Mendenhall River.

The water that’s being released in the glacial outburst is flowing into the river, putting homes that are closest to the river at risk. The National Weather Service said it expected flooding to peak at 4 p.m. local time Wednesday.

“This will be a new record, based on all of the information that we have,” Nicole Ferrin, a weather service meteorologist, told a news conference Tuesday.

Flooding from the basin has become an annual concern since 2011, and in recent years has swept away houses and swamped hundreds of homes. Government agencies installed temporary barriers this year in hopes of protecting several hundred homes in the inundation area from widespread damage.

The flooding happens because a smaller glacier near Mendenhall Glacier retreated — a casualty of the warming climate — and left a basin that fills with rainwater and snowmelt each spring and summer. When the water creates enough pressure, it forces its way under or around the ice dam created by the Mendenhall Glacier and enters Mendenhall Lake and eventually the Mendenhall River, as it did Tuesday.

Before the basin reached the limit of its capacity and began overtopping, the water level was rising rapidly — as much as 4 feet (1.22 meters) per day during especially sunny or rainy days, according to the National Weather Service.

The city saw successive years of record flooding in 2023 and 2024, with the river last August cresting at 15.99 feet (4.9 meters), about 1 foot (0.3 meters) over the prior record set a year earlier, and flooding extending farther into the Mendenhall Valley. This year's flooding was predicted to crest at between 16.3 and 16.8 feet (4.96 to 5.12 meters).

Last year, nearly 300 residences were damaged.

A large outburst can release some 15 billion gallons of water, according to the University of Alaska Southeast and Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center. That’s the equivalent of nearly 23,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. During last year’s flood, the flow rate in the rushing Mendenhall River was about half that of Niagara Falls, the researchers say.

Hatch and his wife saw floodwaters lap at their floorboards in 2023, inspiring them to lift their entire house by around 3-4 feet (1 meter). Last year, their neighbors’ homes flooded by around 1 to 4 feet (0.3-1.2 meters).

City officials responded to concerns from property owners this year by working with state, federal and tribal entities to install a temporary levee along roughly 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of riverbank in an attempt to guard against widespread flooding. The 10,000 “Hesco” barriers are essentially giant sandbags designed to protect the neighborhoods completely during an 18-foot (5.5 meter) flood event, said emergency manager Ryan O’Shaughnessy. The barriers are intended to protect more than 460 properties.

But Hatch fears that if the water crest exceeds predictions, or somehow seeps through, it will actually make flooding at his home worse.

“If it gets around the barriers, like, upriver, and flows down, we basically become a bathtub,” Hatch said, adding that he’ll stay behind to move valuables. “My wife just bought a new mixer. So I’m not going to leave a $400 mixer downstairs, I’ll just carry it up and put it in somebody’s bedroom.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is at the start of what’s expected to be a yearslong process of studying conditions in the region and examining options for a more permanent solution such as a levee. The timeline has angered some residents, who say it’s unreasonable.

Outburst floods are expected to continue as long as the Mendenhall Glacier acts as an ice dam to seal off the basin, which could span another 25 to 60 years, according to the university and science center researchers.

Associated Press writer Becky Bohrer in Juneau contributed to this report.

HESCO flood barriers, to protect property against glacial outburst flooding, separate a residential area from the Mendenhall River, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025., in Juneau, Alaska. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

The Mendenhall Glacier is visible in the distance from a residential area, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Juneau, Alaska. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

People view Mendenhall Glacier from the Mendenhall Glacier Visitors Center area, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Juneau, Alaska. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)

FILE - A canoe, bottom right, glides on Mendenhall Lake, in front of the Mendenhall Glacier, on Sunday, May 18, 2025, in Juneau, Alaska. (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer, File)

HOMS, Syria (AP) — A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.

Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now-ousted President Bashar Assad.

He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.

His Dec. 8, 2024, homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.

But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.

He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.

“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”

On Monday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Assad's fall.

Like Marwan, the country is struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.

Assad's downfall came as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group whose then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president — launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.

They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.

The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country's new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.

Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas in 2019 and 2020.

The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected major offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib intending to “finish the Idlib file,” Abdul Ghani said.

Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas," he said.

In timing the attack, the insurgents also took advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.

When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.

Since his sudden ascent to power, al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and that once considered al-Sharaa a terrorist.

In November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.

In a speech in Damascus on Monday, al-Sharaa described his vision of Syria as “a strong country that belongs to its ancient past, looks forward to a promising future and is restoring its natural position in its Arab, regional and international environment" and will join “the ranks of the most advanced nations.”

But the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Local Druze groups have now set up their own de facto government and military in the southern Sweida province.

There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.

Israel is wary of Syria's new Islamist-led government even though al-Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.

Remnants of the civil war are everywhere. The Mines Advisory Group reported Monday that at least 590 people have been killed by landmines in Syria since Assad’s fall, including 167 children, putting the country on track to record the world’s highest landmine casualty rate in 2025.

Meanwhile, the economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialized on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.

The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.

On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.

Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have come back.

The most damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.

“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back, although the area doesn't even have a water connection.

His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.

“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed," she said.

Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”

But he remains anxious about the precarious security situation and its economic impacts.

“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come," he said. "The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”

The U.N refugee agency reports that more than 1 million refugees and nearly 2 million internally displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since Assad’s fall. But without jobs and reconstruction, some will leave again.

Among them is Marwan, the former prisoner, who says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he is struggling economically.

Sometimes he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.

Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.

Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Omar Albam in Damascus contributed to this report.

Syrian citizens gather at Umayyad square, during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of former President Bashar Assad in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Fireworks and light beams illuminate the sky as people fill Clock Square in central Homs, western Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025, to mark the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime. (AP Photo/Omar Albam)

Army helicopters fly overhead during a parade by the new Syrian army marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A Syrian man waves his country flag during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of former President Bashar Assad in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

FILE - A man breaks the lock of a cell in the infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)

Former detainee Mohammad Marwan walks down a street on his way to the Homs Recovery Center in the village of Tell Dahab in the Homs countryside, Syria, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A girl sits on a machine gun as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A boy checks out military equipment as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)

A Syrian man silhouetted by a digital billboard showing the date of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime during celebrations marking the first anniversary, in Damascus , Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. The Arabic words read: "A history retold and a bond renewed." (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Wanted portraits of former Syrian president Bashar Assad are displayed in the window of a coffeeshop, in Damascus Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025, as Syrians celebrate marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Syrian men wearing anonymous masks flash victory signs, as they stand on top of their car with its front window covered by an Islamic flag, during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)