Pleased neighbors watched from homes as the clean-up crews loaded a Dumpster with scrap lumber, faded flower pots, broken toilets, crumbling concrete cylinders, bike frames and heaps of other stuff.
But rest easy, Snowzilla fans. City officials won't mess with the massive winter sculpture that has become a media sensation.
Powers, the man behind the two-story-tall snowman, has maddened the community council for more than a decade, refusing to clear the clutter around his weathered Columbine Street home, city officials said.
Code enforcement officers have told him for years to clean the yard. They finally secured a court order this year so they could seize the junk.
The city defines junk as anything that doesn't work or can't be used for its original purpose. City officials usually get involved only after neighbors complain. They ask property owners to clean up their messes -- most comply, said Jack Frost, the city's chief of code enforcement, not the guy who ran for mayor.
The money for the cleanup at Powers' house came from a federal program designed to remove urban blight, Frost said.
City enforcement officers billed Powers $8,500 for the three-hour cleaning, bringing his total fines to $16,000 over three years, Frost said.
An upbeat Powers, standing outside his front door in baby-blue Crocs and jeans Wednesday afternoon, took the cleaning in stride.
"It's my own fault," said Powers, a longtime Anchorage resident who looks younger than his 51 years. "I should have kept my place tidier. I just got to lick my wounds and go on."
He called the workers and city enforcement officers nice people.
"I'm thrilled because they didn't take some stuff they could have taken," he said. "It's all a matter of what you call junk."
Powers and neighbor Darrell Estes labored through the night to clean what they could, piling scores of rusty iron rods alongside a fence and ripping out waist-high weeds that had worked their way through the chaos. With a yellow forklift, they removed four of those long carts that haul luggage to airplanes, giving them to a neighbor.
"It looks a hell of a lot better than it did," said Steve Pyles, a neighbor in a mint-green house that overlooked the mess.
Mayor Rick Mystrom launched a program to clean trashy yards more than a decade ago, starting with Powers' house, Pyles said. But the mess soon sprang up again. It will return, he said.
Nope, Powers said. He vowed to make his house the prettiest in the neighborhood.
"Yeah, right," Pyles later scoffed.
The cleaners left plenty of stuff, including the rusted '47 flatbed that's squatted in Powers' front yard for years. He and Estes jump-started it to life Wednesday to prove it works. Powers just needs to put headlights and a windshield in it, city officials said.
They also left Powers' big blacksmith table in the front yard, where he fashions iron rods into ornamental stands for flower pots.
And they didn't touch the flat-roofed house, which looks like a Bush cabin. Weather-beaten plywood serves as siding. Scraps of tar paper peel off one side of the house. Insulation hangs from the rafters like animal pelts. There's piles of stuff atop the house too.
Powers said he's wanted to clean the yard and upgrade his home for years, but he thought it was more important to spend time with his kids. Jobs -- he's now a superintendent for a construction company -- also kept him busy.
Plus, if Powers improved the house, that would increase the property value, and he'd have to pay more taxes, he said. The house hasn't seen a coat of paint since Powers moved there in 1979, but it's still overvalued, he said.
"I got a tar-paper shack and it's worth $175,000," he said. Wednesday afternoon, he still had work to do. Four trucks sat in front of the house, three piled with clutter collected from the yard. Snowzilla's big top hat -- made from tomato cages -- sat atop one pile.
Powers has a plan for much of the remaining junk.
"The city of Anchorage has kind of outgrown me," he said.
He intends to haul the stuff to his land near Wasilla, where he's in the early stages of building a house he hopes to move to some day.
Find Alex deMarban online at adn.com/contact/ademarban or call 257-4310.
The meaning of junk
Junk or salvage means any abandoned, used, wornout, wrecked, scrapped, partially or fully dismantled or discarded tangible material, including vehicles of all kinds, or any combination of materials or items including appliances, chemicals, building materials, equipment or parts thereof, fiber, machinery, metal, scrap metal, rags, rubber, paper, plastics, lumber or wood, that cannot without further alteration and reconditioning be used for their original purposes.
Source: Anchorage City Code The meaning of junk
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