Alaska News

Family, friends remember 'electric personalities' lost in Sitka landslide

SITKA -- The bodies of two men have been recovered in a neighborhood hit by a massive landslide Tuesday, with the third likely to be recovered later Thursday, authorities said.

Sitkans are now remembering those their community has lost, including two vibrant young men and a highly regarded public official.

Missing after the Kramer Avenue slide were brothers Elmer Diaz, 26, and Ulises Diaz, 25, who were painting a new home, and William Stortz, 62, a city building inspector monitoring newly installed drainage systems in the area.

Sitka Mayor Mim McConnell said all three are thought to be dead, with two bodies recovered and multiple indications from search dogs that the location of a third body has been found. Crews were working toward that site Thursday afternoon.

"I'm really hopeful that today will be the end of the recovery," McConnell said Thursday. She spent most of the day at the Kramer Avenue location, where heavy equipment and ground teams were working to recover the remaining body.

As the scale of the devastation became clear, initial hopes that any of the three could have survived faded and Sitkans began mourning the losses.

McConnell said she's convinced from what she's seen that all three died almost instantly during the initial slide and were probably knocked unconscious by the force of a landslide moving 1,000 feet down the side of steep Harbor Mountain.

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Still, family members maintained hope, with Stortz's wife standing vigil over the site and authorities providing a safety escort for members of the Diaz family on repeated visits to the dangerous site.

Members of both families have declined public comment.

Sitka Fire Department Assistant Chief Al Stevens, serving as incident commander, said the family of the victims whose bodies have been recovered so far has asked them to not be publicly identified, and the department is complying with their wishes.

"We're going to honor that. This is a small community -- it's a tight-knit community -- and we need to do that," he said.

The two bodies were found in the vicinity of the house in which the Diaz brothers were working, and many in the community remember the two men fondly.

The loss of two such young men in a town like Sitka is particularly troubling, McConnell said.

"They were really well loved, and really neat kids. A lot of people had connections with that family," she said.

"The fabulous Diaz brothers," said local coach and sports official Keith Perkins.

His son Anthony was a friend of the two and came up with the phrase at Grace Harbor Lutheran Church on Sitka's Halibut Point Road. A makeshift memorial was created there as it was being used as a relief and volunteer staging area.

Perkins said the brothers "almost lived" on the couch at his house, hanging out with Anthony, as he recalled their "electric personalities" Thursday.

"They were always upbeat," Perkins said. "Crazy fun, in a good way -- just productive people in life."

There were often more volunteers than could be used at the cramped and still-treacherous site. But Perkins said his son was able to put in a four-hour shift on the recovery effort Wednesday, work that helped him and many other Sitkans feel like they were contributing.

McConnell said the outpouring of assistance was to be expected.

"Sitkans are really good about taking care of each other during a hard time like this," she said.

McConnell herself knew Stortz well, both through his city job and as a one-time neighbor. Many of the firefighters working in the search effort knew him as well, as he also served as fire marshal.

The intense rainfall from earlier in the week had subsided, which cleared the way for the recovery efforts before Friday's expected arrival of a new front.

Assistant Chief Stevens said the break was needed to help the land drain and stabilize, enabling crews to work.

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"This sunshine is very much welcomed," he said. "The weather has certainly hampered everything up to this point."

The intense storm that did the damage earlier this week brought about 2.5 inches of rain. National Weather Service meteorologist Joel Curtis said he's expecting the coming weather front to bring Sitka a similar amount of rain.

But, crucially, it will likely fall over 36 hours, a far longer period than Tuesday's storm, and is unlikely to result in new landslides.

But at the Kramer Avenue site, Stevens said several geologists advising incident command are warning there is still much unstable material from the slide.

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