Once again, we remind you that we cannot urge you to take action on our behalf without involving ourselves in the additional IRS paperwork hassles associated with lobbying activities, but this is the key information you would need if you should decide to act on your own.

This is the second of three pages in the Budget Information series, detailing what is required to run an avalanche program that meets the established standard of care.

What Avalanche Forecasting Requires:

Field Crew

Avalanche forecasting requires a daily field presence. Those days are long and hard. The weather is usually stormy and trailbreaking is difficult. Field days average 10 hours including preparation, field time, gear maintenance, processing the data, and incorporating it into the forecast. Two workers are the necessary minimum for risk management when working in dangerous avalanche terrain.

Daily presence means that forecasters are out in whatever weather we may have, whether it is snow and wind, gentle snow, the rare sunny day, or torrential rain. Twenty-four hour, seven day coverage means that if a storm comes in during the middle of the night, we are up and out the door to monitor the conditions continuously.

Coverage and Staffing

An urban forecasting program must run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That requires a staff of three fieldworkers in order to have two always on duty, and one office administrator. Two of the fieldworkers must be fully qualified forecasters based in Juneau. This minimum level of staffing is inescapable.

Avalanche fieldwork involves frequent visits to test slopes at starting zone elevations, where we observe the character, loading, and distribution of the snowpack, measure and record the layers in the snowpack, and do a number of dynamic tests like the AK Block at left.

Forecaster Availability

Good forecasters are hard to find. It takes a minimum of ten years to train one, and there are less than 150 in the U.S. They are not available for less than a full season or for less than a professional-level wage, and most already have jobs they are not leaving. Forecasters generally make their commitments for the upcoming winter in August.

Field assistant Mike Janes, left and right above, and apprentice forecaster Kent Scheler, center above, have gone through years of training, mentorship, and field time to acquire the skills to manage risk while working and traveling in dangerous avalanche terrain and conditions and to learn how to evaluate snow stabillity with the high level of accuracy we require.

Season Length

It would be professionally irresponsible to suggest that any ongoing program operate for less than a full six-month season. The risk of major cycles occurring outside the program period is far too high, and effective snowpack study must begin as the basal layers form so they can be monitored continuously to forecast deep slabs. There is no way to accurately target or staff for a short period within the season.

Snowpack studies must begin with the first snowfall in order to keep track of the changes in the deep layers and track potential weaknesses as they develop. Contrary to popular opinion, destructive slides do not require huge amounts of snow. Avalanche activity depends mostly on the sequence of layers and the timing of loading events, not on the total amount of snow. Large avalanches in our area occur any time between early November and June, but major avalanche cycles in the mountains above town are generally over by the end of April, requiring a six-month forecasting season.

Minimum Budget to Meet Standard of Care

The $156,096 budget is the absolute minimum on which we can run an urban-only forecasting program that meets the established standard of care for work in our field. We are a nonprofit, dedicated to serving the community. We do not pad our budgets in expectation of cuts. We must meet professional standards and community expectations for forecast accuracy, and we must ensure that our workers and the public are not put at undue risk. Anything less than the budget we have listed here would expose us and the CBJ as well to liability for professional negligence, and we cannot allow ourselves to be put in that position. Quite simply, there is no way we or anyone else can do an adequate job for less.

Debris from the year 2000 Cordova avalanche illustrates the destructive power of moving snow and the difficulty of urban avalanche search. Twisted sheet metal, broken glass, gas leaks, hazardous chemicals, and shattered timbers are some of the hazards searchers face, in addition to the risk of secondary slides. Locating victims among the debris is very difficult. Clearing the debris to get them out requires wrecking tools and many shovelers. Heavy equipment must not be driven over or dig in snow that may have people under it.