Mat-Su

As Matanuska River threatens more homes, residents push for government help

SUTTON -- With the Matanuska River swamping his property, Terry Van Wyhe spent Monday moving a historic building out of the water's path and applying for flood insurance.

The river, swollen with glacial melt since last weekend and carving sandy banks like butter, already sent one home and a half-dozen buildings at the Luch property toppling into the water near Mile 64 of the Glenn Highway just east of Sutton. Three more homes were in imminent danger Monday.

In all, seven properties are at risk as the river has devoured 50 to 60 feet of bank in the past week -- as much as 150 feet over the years in total -- in what's become an annual erosion event pinned to summer melting of the Matanuska Glacier and runoff from rain-swollen tributaries.

The highway itself is also at risk, which is apparently triggering emergency protection measures, according to state Rep. Jim Colver, who represents the Sutton area.

Colver spent Monday at the Sutton homes and convened a meeting in Palmer with state transportation officials about the risk to the Glenn. He said the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities is moving forward with an emergency determination at Mile 64 that will free up funding for a project to keep the river at bay. The plan is to dig a deep trench parallel to the road and fill it with large rocks to stop the water's progress.

"We can't afford to let it get to the edge of the highway before they do something," Colver said.

The Matanuska is a broad, braided river that's consumed dozens of buildings over the decades on this stretch by Sutton and in Butte as its channels meandered from side to side. A series of dikes in Butte protect some properties, but Sutton residents say it was a neglected 1980s dike project that eventually led to the destructive erosion happening now.

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Van Wyhe, a Copper Center farmer who sells pigs on the property, was trying to get signed up Monday for a Matanuska-Susitna Borough property buyout program that offers landowners money to move out of the river's way. The borough started applying for buyout grant money last year but was rejected in the first round of applications; another application is in the works.

Van Wyhe and neighbor Colleen Boyle ran into a catch this week: they need flood insurance to qualify for the program, and neither have it. They were having trouble getting action on calls to insurance companies. A borough floodplain administrator was en route to help them.

Van Wyhe was frustrated at the whole situation -- the flooding, the insurance, and what he and other neighbors say is the lack of help from the borough to stave off the river by digging a channel to redirect the water, installing dikes or armoring the bank with rocks.

"It could have been an easy fix really, but they have to study it and study it and study it," Van Wyhe said.

A 2014 report commissioned by the borough recommended either dikes or bank armoring in combination with a channel, but said a channel alone was not the solution to erosion problems in the Sutton area. Any structural fix would be a "multi-year, multi-million-dollar" project, said borough Assembly member Jim Sykes, who represents Sutton as part of his district.

The borough isn't working on any immediate fixes for the river erosion gobbling up land and property: the high water makes it physically impossible to work in the water, but the borough is also a second-class municipality with little authority over erosion control. Residents here tend to clamor for less government, not more.

"That's the trade-off that you pay for a hands-off government," said borough emergency manager Casey Cook. "Then the responsibility falls on the homeowners."

It's easier getting money for an emergency than it is to get funds for prevention, Sykes and other borough officials at Sutton said Monday.

"We've been working on this a long time," he said. "So I hope this triggers some action."

Wyhe's historic building -- Eino Kuoppala built it from lumber gleaned from the old Jonesville Mine -- was headed back to Copper Center by early afternoon Monday.

Next door, Boyle's neat yellow house is also threatened by the river. She hopes to move it, but can't afford to pay someone twice to take it somewhere temporary now and then to whatever property she can buy later.

"I'm just so stressed out I don't know what to do," Boyle told Cook.

He told her there may be a Natural Resources Conservation Service program that pays three-quarters of the moving cost. It's possible she could move to borough property in exchange for hers.

Despite the presence of state and borough officials at the threatened Sutton properties Monday, people in the neighborhood complained that the government neglected the river -- and them -- until now despite the relatively high property taxes they pay.

Several described trouble getting even basic needs like a dumpster for debris removal as volunteers scrambled to extract toxic materials from buildings before they go into the river.

"We pay the highest mill rate in the borough and we get absolutely nothing," said Mike Pearson, whose house sits just downriver from Boyle's. "What I'm really pissed about is the unwillingness to be neighborly and Alaskan and just lend a hand."

Zaz Hollander

Zaz Hollander is a veteran journalist based in the Mat-Su and is currently an ADN local news editor and reporter. She covers breaking news, the Mat-Su region, aviation and general assignments. Contact her at zhollander@adn.com.

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