‘Savvy’ cat reunited with owners weeks after floods destroyed Alaska home

Elizabeth Wilkins and her partner were on a mountain biking trip in Oregon when she heard that their two-story home in Juneau, Alaska, had collapsed into a nearby river. A glacial outburst had flooded the waters, sweeping away her house and her belongings.

Twenty-six days later, she discovered that not all had been lost.

The couple’s precious cat, Leo, was found alive and well in a nearby neighborhood nearly a month after an unprecedented level of flooding from the 3,000-year-old Mendenhall Glacier destroyed two riverfront homes and damaged several others – an incident that perplexed scientists and forced city officials to declare a state of emergency.

Wilkins, 54, a special-education teacher originally from New York, was reunited with Leo after Juneau residents caught wind of the missing cat and banded together to post photos of any strays they came across on Facebook. Eventually, one of Wilkins’s friends identified Leo from a photo taken in a woman’s backyard, prompting Wilkins to immediately search the area. She called out his name, and he came running up to her, “very doglike,” she said.

“I could not stop laughing and smiling,” she said.

It had crossed Wilkins’s mind that Leo, an indoor-outdoor cat, could have been inside the house at the time of the floods, potentially doomed to the currents. “It was kind of a terrible feeling, actually. Like I was failing him somehow,” she said.

Even so, she said she remained “pretty confident” that he had survived the elements during the nearly month-long search for him across Alaska’s capital city; Leo, 3, was a rowdy and tough cat known to hike for miles on rugged forest trails and sit on her shoulders as she went cross-country skiing, she said. She had even seen him “sniffing bears’ noses.”

“He lives with eagles and hawks. He’s pretty savvy,” she said.

Flooding from the Mendenhall Glacier has been happening every summer since 2011, but the incident in early August surpassed previous water-level records by nearly three feet. “It really exceeded our expectations,” National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Park told The Post at the time. He said it was “pretty devastating for the community.”

Park said researchers have found that a basin above the Mendenhall Glacier is able to create enough pressure to push water through the glacier and into Mendenhall Lake, creating a flood risk to the community. Each year, the basin fills until the pressure causes the water to look for a path out.

Wilkins and her partner, Tom Schwartz, were renting the house that was destroyed in the floods and are pet-sitting for a friend as they look for a new place to call home. Wilkins said Leo’s doing well: “He is right back to his old antics. He killed three mice yesterday.”

Finding a place to live in Juneau on a teacher’s salary has proved difficult, Wilkins said, citing the “cutthroat” housing market.

“The day of the flooding, it was beautiful outside – gorgeous,” she said. “Our house was 180 feet away from the river, and it wasn’t a flood zone. … It’s amazing how quickly life can change in just a few hours.”