Borough in breakup rut

MAT-SU — That springtime roads in the Valley will be mushy, rutted and potholed is a fact of life as reliable as the season.

But the ruts and potholes on Stacy Street have gone above and beyond, taking out two Central Mat-Su Fire Department trucks that responded to a fire there on Sunday evening. Fire chief James Steele said the Mat-Su Borough was watching the road as it deteriorated through breakup. The nine fire trucks his crews brought to the flaming mobile home made it worse. The ruts, he said, had come to resemble something more like a series of miniature sinkholes.

“As all that weight (that) went down them just added to some of that damage that was already there and it caused conditions to really deteriorate rapidly on the road,” Steele said. So, leaving the fire, they were extra careful. “We emptied out all the trucks of any remaining water and then spaced them out and brought them at slow speed through there.”

It wasn’t enough. One engine and one tanker were damaged in transit.

“The tanker actually wedged a couple of bigger rocks up between the front and rear dual wheels,” Steele said. “Once they got back out on the pavement they were able to beat those rocks out.”

But a ways farther down the road, smoke was coming out from the engine compartment. Turns out mud and gravel had been kicked up into the engine and burned out the serpentine belt. An engineer was able to slowly drive it back to the station, stopping frequently to let the truck cool down before starting up again.

As for the engine, Steele said it took some damage to a front bumper storage compartment that holds a roll of hose. The more serious damage, though, was to an electronic control module that was pushed out of place, damaging the unit and the assembly holding it in place.

Steele estimated repairs will take “anywhere from a couple of days to a week and a half.”

The Mat-Su Borough School District, meanwhile, said that until the borough fixes that road it won’t be able to send school buses into the Stacy Street neighborhood.

“The fire trucks tore the road up enough that the buses will not go in there until the borough fixes the road,” Mat-Su Borough School District spokeswoman Catherine Esary wrote in an email quoting the district’s supervisor of pupil transportation.

On scene Monday, it appeared that help had arrived sooner rather than later. Crews from Northern Asphalt Construction, the company that holds the maintenance contract for the area, were filling in the road surface.

And the Meadow Lakes area isn’t the only one dealing with torn up roads or standing water. The Frontiersman fielded reports of seasonal trouble from the Palmer Fishhook area all the way up to Willow.

A sign on Pond Lilly Drive off of Hollywood Road Monday afternoon warned that the road had been closed to all but four-wheel-drive vehicles. Standing water seemed to indicate crossing it would be harrowing for lesser vehicles. Callers who live up the road say its been all but impassable for more than three weeks now.

And Central Mat-Su isn’t the only fire department to have its trucks get into trouble.

“We had a structure fire up on top of a hill and the road leading up to it was just a mess,” said West Lakes Fire Chief Bill Gamble, who oversees the Willow Fire Department said.

By the time it was all said and done, a tanker and an engine were stuck.

“We were able to get the tanker out without any help, but we had to bring a front loader in from Newman’s Hiltop (Tesoro) to get the engine out,” Gamble said.

He said firefighters this time of year engage, as the always do, in a risk-reward calculation. It might not be worth, for instance, risking damage to a $300,000 to $400,000 fire truck for a fire that isn’t threatening anyone’s life or for a fire in which the home is already fully involved or completely on fire.

So what was the calculus on this one?

“Probably what happened in Willow, it probably wasn’t worth what happened because the place was fully involved when we got there,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.