Ice had also flattened the street sign marking the corner of Lincoln and Front streets. That is where Eagle teacher Ryan Becker had taken pictures with his students each school day since January as they were on their way to take ice measurements.
In the dead of night, the river had thrown its strongest punch. The ice sheared steel posts of the seawall. The swollen Yukon cluttered the upstream boat landing with Sherman tanks of ice that will not melt till June, if then. The road to Eagle Village was thoroughly impassable with similar blocks, though there was an alternative path for four-wheelers that connected the village to Eagle, the Alaska highway system and the rest of North America.
The river’s 2023 hit was a glancing blow to Eagle — not the floating cabins tethered by powerlines like dogs on leashes of 2009 nor the seven homes knocked off their foundations in 2013.
By late morning on May 14, 2023, the river in front of Eagle was moving fast and free. The pulse of water that damaged the seawall was cruising 160 miles downriver to the next Alaska community of Circle. There, combined with another jam, it would cause major flooding, which included the loss of power and extreme water and ice damage to homes. (At the time of this writing, officials didn’t know if it was the worst flood ever recorded there).
Eagle, though, slid through another breakup, this one of the type that came with increased risk of dynamic flooding due to a tardy spring that locked the landscape in winter cold as the days ticked on.
As it warmed to the 60s Fahrenheit, neither townspeople nor professional hydrologists knew what the river was going to do in Eagle. But Johnson had seen enough on his upriver flights to tell residents to “prepare for 2009.”
By the evening of May 14, two days after the real action had begun, most of the unimaginable tons of river ice had disappeared downstream. That was except for stranded icebergs on roads around town, and a tall ring of ice surrounding Belle Island that would calve like a glacier for the next week.
The ducks and songbirds that hadn’t seemed disturbed by all the action continued to prepare for their summer of making babies in the North. The people of Eagle thought ahead to turning over the soil in their gardens so the brown dirt could warm in the sunshine. They had made it through Yukon River’s transition from winter to summer once again.
“This was a good one,” Eagle’s Village Public Safety Officer Nate Becker said to Crane Johnson near the Falcon Inn on the afternoon of May 14. “We had a lot of excitement, but nobody got hurt.”
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