Battered for three days by torrential rains, the side of Mt. Roberts gave away at 8:15 am. Friday last and sent a mass of mud and mighty timbers crashing down to slopes to pause 200 feet from Juneau's downtown business center.
The landslide tore two houses from their foundations and completely
smothered one, burying a woman, Mrs. Alec Kupoff, beneath ten feet of lumber and debris. She was reseued, miraculously unharmed. None others were injured although Kupoff had left the house only a few minutes carlier.
Sixty feet from the rear of the Alaskan Hotel the slide stopped, leaving Gastineau Avenue under a 50-foot blanket of mud and fallen trees. A single timber rolled over the slope and smashed into a rear window of the hotel completely filling the window and extending nine feet inside. This 55-foot log gave Art Thane and M. A. Morley, occupants of the room, the scare of their lives as it passed between bureau and bed and roused them out of a sound sleep.
Rade Cvetich was cleaning the sidewalk along Gastineau Avenue when he heard a sound "like a shot," and looked up to see the avalanche plummeting over 1000 feet down the mountainside. The slide took about one minute to reach the city's outskirts and cut a swath not ten feet from where he was standing.
The Kupoff house was completely wrecked while the Torrell Apartments were twisted around and left in a precarious teetering position on the slide bed. Mrs. Eny Allen, wife of a painter, was in one of the cabin apartments at the time but was not injured.
A third house in which Mrs. Dimple Elswick was residing was damaged when the Kupoff cabin smashed into it. Mrs. Elswick was in bed at the time of the crash but was not endangered.
Mrs. Kupoff, although her life was in peril, was considerably more worried about her house cat than her own safety. Johnson and Cyetich located her in the debris when she began calling "Here kitty, kitty."
Several tons of mud were washed down the side of the mountain and how Mrs. Kupoff managed to escape with her life when the little one-story cabin was smashed is almost inexplicable. In the wake of the slide, which extended far up the side of the hill, a churning stream sped downward.
The slide stopped just about 200 feet from Franklin Street. Had its force been but slightly greater, the ensuing damage would have mounted to large proportions.
