3 Talkeetna buildings burn, others spared

TALKEETNA — Three buildings were heavily damaged in a downtown fire early Thursday morning.

Talkeetna Fire Chief Ken Farina said he responded to the scene at 2:24 a.m., and called for reinforcements after he saw Denali Zipline Tours, Denali Dry Goods and the Little Dumplings Café semi-permanent food trailer all burning.

“It was downtown. The buildings are closely packed I was afraid we would lose half the town,” he said.

Reinforcements arrived from as far south as the Central Mat-Su Fire Department in Wasilla, but aid also came from the Houston, West Lakes and Willow fire departments.

“We got a knock down on it and then reinforcements came up from our neighboring departments,” Farina said.

Alaska State Troopers report in a press release that Little Dumplings was destroyed. The other two businesses were nearly destroyed as well, Farina said. He had to cut a hole in the roof of Denali Dry Goods to vent it.

“They had a lot of nice inventory in there — furs, a lot of handcrafted stuff,” the fire chief said.

Farina said everyone involved in fighting the blaze did great work, especially considering how much worse it could have been. He said they had some help from the weather, which was calm in contrast to winds that lashed other parts of the Valley that night.

“The last two days have been really windy and if this would have happened two days ago we might have lost the whole town,” Farina said.

It’s been a really tough couple of months for Talkeetna, which was among the hardest hit areas when several Valley rivers saw widespread flooding in late September.

Half the town evacuated then after the Talkeetna River overran its banks, flooding an east side subdivision. Another subdivision was cut off briefly after a dike failed on Yoder Road.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.