Kenai’s eroding bluff has plagued the city for decades. On Monday, stakeholders gathered to celebrate a major milestone in a project to stabilize the bluff, with the hope it will inspire new investments in the area moving forward.
Just yards from where the Kenai Senior Center’s backyard plunges about 60 feet into the Kenai River, about 50 people gathered Monday to celebrate the start of Kenai’s long-awaited bluff stabilization project.
That project has been the city of Kenai’s chief capital priority for decades. The receding bluff loses three feet each year due to weather and other erosion, threatening the homes and businesses on top of it.
The ribbon cutting kicked off work on a nearly mile-long rock berm at the toe of the bluff, starting near the mouth of the Kenai River and ending near the city dock. It’s intended to protect the bottom of the bluff from waves and weather, and to allow the top to stabilize and vegetate over time.
Col. Jeff Palazzini is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s the agency behind the project. He says the 5,000 feet of project area was determined by identifying the part of the bluff experiencing the most erosion and that protects the most infrastructure and the most people, while also being most cost effective.
“You can think about it working in two different directions,” Palazzini said. “The revetment there is keeping the bluff from sliding into the river, and it's also preventing the river from eating away at the bottom of the bluff. So it kind of protects it from two different directions.”
Project Director Cole Jacobson, also with the Corps, says the gaps in the rocks that make up the berm are what will absorb — and then dissipate — energy from waves that would otherwise hit the bluff head on. Each layer of rock, Jacobson says, breaks up a different portion of the energy.
The impacts of the berm on the bluff won’t be immediate, Jacobson says.
“It's important for people to know that this is not going to stop the erosion in its tracks,” he said. “A revetment to do that would be prohibitively expensive. What it's going to do is it's going to provide a foundation for the buff to continue to settle, but it's going to stabilize at a more reasonable slope and at that point, vegetation will be able to take hold. So probably three to five years, we'll be looking at a more stable bluff, and then five to 10 years, vegetation will take hold and at that point, it should be in a pretty safe, stable condition.”
Kenai’s bluff stabilization project has taken major steps forward in recent years. That’s due to a combination of new sources of money and a change to how much the city will be expected to pay.
Originally, the price tag was $42 million. Of that, the city was on the hook for just over a third of the costs, and the federal government would cover the rest.
U.S. Sen Lisa Murkowski, who attended Monday’s ceremony, secured $28 million for the federal side through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The state chipped in another $6.5 million through last year’s budget.
Then, the federal Water Resources Development Act was passed. That bill reduced the amount of money the city needed to pay to one-tenth. When the project was finally put out to bid last December, it came in under budget — around $20 million.
That new, lower price tag, combined with the city’s reduced share, helped move the project along.
“This is something where the need has been established over decades, over almost a half of a century,” Murkowski said Monday. “And the problem hasn't gotten any better. It has become more of a threat, a threat to commercial property, residential, historic properties. And so the need has been demonstrated.”
Among the city officials also in attendance, including Public Works Director Scott Curtin, there was a sense of excitement and disbelief.
“It's funny, I still think we have a lot of folks that don't believe we're here,” he said. “Until rocks show up and we're actually placing rocks on the beach, I still don't think people are gonna believe that we're actually here after decades, you know, of talking about it.”
Curtin takes care of the day-to-day maintenance of the city’s assets, including those that have been threatened by bluff erosion. He says stabilizing the bluff will give his department a sense of security and him less sleepless nights.
Kenai Mayor Brian Gabriel says he’s been working to dispel similar disbelief that the project is actually moving forward.
“There's a little cynicism, obviously, because this has been such a long project that, you know, ‘I'll see it when I believe’ and I'm like, ‘No, it's time to believe it, you know, that we're here, we're getting to this point where, you know, the end is in sight,’” he said.
Kenai residents won’t see construction this summer. That’s because the first task is to secure the rock for the berm. That’ll happen off site. The materials will be barged in next summer, with construction expected to be complete in 2026.
In the meantime, Kenai City Manager Terry Eubank says he hopes the project will encourage new development in an area that hasn’t had a lot of interest due to the erosion. He pointed to the city’s ongoing waterfront revitalization project as one initiative a stable bluff would benefit.
“We're just looking forward to the future. And you know, this opens up possibilities for the city,” he said. “You know, people haven't been willing to invest in Old Town and along that bluff for 40 years because everything you invest in is going to fall off one day. Well, we're hoping to put an end to that.”
