Bad road hampers firefighting

WASILLA — Road conditions hampered firefighters’ efforts to battle a house fire in the Bogard Road area Saturday morning.

“There were a husband a wife, and they told us two children in (the house),” Central Mat-Su Fire Chief James Steele said. “The husband had gotten up and was up and heard this sort of a pop and then smelled smoke, so he alerted the rest of the family and got them out.”

He described the home as a trailer with add-ons, a story and a half tall, unfinished with boards over many of the places where windows would be.

“There’s, I would say, probably 40 percent of the structure damaged by fire damage and most of the rest of the structure had smoke damage in it,” Steele said.

The home sits on Pike Avenue, a half mile from one of Mat-Su’s largest thoroughfares — Bogard Road — and a mile and a half from Bogard’s intersection with Seldon Road.

Still, Steele said, the road is not up to standard. It’s a pioneer road, just 13-feet wide that has never really been updated.

“There’s no passing, once you get equipment in there it’s stuck in there,” Steele said.

Steele said firefighters laid 1,000 feet of hose to get to the engine they managed to get up the road. Everyone had to walk in.

It wasn’t the way Steele likes to fight a fire.

“Anytime that you’re laying hose it takes more time, or if you can’t get your equipment in there, then you’re actually carrying hose and trying to pull those bigger lines in and that takes an enormous amount of time to just get your lines in,” Steele said.

Not only does it take more time, but each foot of a 5-inch line contains a gallon of water.

“That’s 1,000 gallons of water to fill the hose,” Steele said.

The road actually punches through, running from Bear Street and connecting with King Salmon Drive.

“That is another entrance, but that has an old railroad flat car that’s been put over the creek, so we can’t run equipment over that because it’s not a rated bridge. We have no idea how much capacity that bridge can even hold,” Steele said.

Rail cars, pioneer roads — these are the sorts of things you hear about when discussing roads in places like Caswell and Trapper Creek. It’s not the sort of thing you typically come across less than two miles from Bogard Road.

Steele said this isn’t the only road with these issues. He said he is aware of several roads that were built initially as pioneer roads and then the homes were developed and the properties were developed so they’ve never actually come into a road service area or never been improved to meet borough standards.

This particular trouble spot has been on Steele’s radar for several years. Another house fire about five years ago encountered similar problems, as did efforts to fight a brush fire there during a windstorm.

Mike Blodgett owned that home that burned down years ago. He said he also sold coal and had a business there, a woodworking and cabinetry shop. He had equipment, lubricating oil and paint and other chemicals on the property.

“It was a big fire. Me and my wife were in Anchorage and we were coming across the flats, a nice clear blue day, and we could see the smoke on the flats,” Blodgett said.

He said that he lost everything, $250,000 in assets, in that fire and he’s been fighting with the borough for years trying to get the road fixed. Blodgett said the answer he gets is that the subdivision was created illegally, but to him that doesn’t make sense.

“Half of the subdivision they upgraded the roads, the other half they let people die on,” Blodgett said.

He said he thinks two heart attacks on that road could have been survivable if ambulance service been able to reach the patients in time.

The frustration in his voice is clear, even over the phone.

“It’s been an illegal subdivision for 30 years,” Blodgett said. In that time, the borough should have found a solution. “They don’t have a problem enforcing the laws that will make them money.”

Assemblyman Ron Arvin, who represents the area, said the problem is actually even more complex than Blodgett describes.

“There’s some access issues and there’s been what might be described as the landowner perception of who owns and can control that road,” Arvin said. “There’s been brush put on that road and the road’s been dug up and blocked.”

It’s not clear whether the borough owns the road or whether it has an easement along it, he said. Structures have been built into what would be the right of way for a larger road, so if the borough were to buy up land to fix the road it wouldn’t come cheap.

“It quickly became such a hairball that a solution is not readily attainable,” Arvin said.

It also won’t be cheap to fix. Arvin said the grade there needs to come down. Steele pointed out that it’s no small thing to build a road that can support a bulky fire truck.

“You’re talking about trucks that weigh 40,000 to close to 84,000 pounds and that are 13 feet tall some of them, and that need a good 11 to 12 feet of clearance to get in there,” Steele said.

Arvin said it’s a sad example of a place where government just doesn’t have the solution.

“It is a tragedy when one comes to terms with that. They just expect that there is a solution and the government is able to fix everything. Well, the government is not able to fix everything especially when it comes to private property issues,” he said.

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