Events

Landslides cause billions of dollars and dozens of casualties annually in the US. Situated up against the steep mountains and along the cost of Baranof Island, Sitka, Alaska annually sustains economic and occasional human losses from landslides, spurring city and government initiatives to measure environmental predictors of landslide risk to inform officials where to allocate resources and intervention measures. Efforts have been made to study the soil conditions leading up to and during a landslide, but are limited by cost and ability to instrument enough sites to capture a landslide in action. Traditional methods are expensive, bulky, and hard to install, limiting the number of slopes that can be studied. The SitkaNet project is a low-cost, customized, open-source alternative that allows for numerous sites to be studied. Using industry-proven sensors, each SitkaNet node can measure rainfall, soil moisture levels at 6 different depths, water table, atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature at each site. The cost of a node is roughly $1000 compared to over $10,000 for existing systems. The install process is also more streamlined, allowing for a node to be installed in less than a day. Combining LoRa wireless networking technology and Google cloud creates a robust system for accessing in-situ data from anywhere in the world in near real-time. The SitkaNet system relies on each node transmitting data wirelessly at five minute intervals to an internet hub located in the city, removing the cost of cellular or satellite networks. The end goal of this project is to establish long term monitoring in Sitka and eventually make additions to the system that would allow it to warn of potential landslides throughout southeastern Alaska and other remote communities that are impacted by landslide-causing events and hazardous weather conditions.