Borough must act to fix road

The news often repeats itself.

Sometimes this phenomenon is wonderful — we will never get tired of going to school events with adorable, excited children.

Sometimes it’s tedious — the same events happen year after year and we have to find a way to write a fresh story each time.

Sometimes it’s tragic — we will never get used to reporting on sick children who need help with medical bills.

And sometimes it’s infuriating.

That’s the case with the latest news to repeat itself out of the neighborhoods north of Bogard Road in the Finger Lake area.

Four times homes in that neighborhood have burned, and all four times firefighters have told us that the roads in that neighborhood are substandard and hamper firefighting.

In January, the Hvamstad family lost everything when their home caught fire. Firefighters at the time said road conditions on Pike Avenue hindered their ability to reach the fire.

First they had to run 1,000 feet of hose to the home. That is not only time consuming, but it means less water to fight the fire with because each foot of hose means a gallon of water that is used to fill the hose rather than spray on the flames.

The most recent fire actually posed no problems to fire response, officials say. But that was only because the roads happened to be dry and not covered in ice. It would have been a different story with different weather conditions.

This kind of thing happens all the time in Mat-Su, but not in a place like Pike Avenue. This road is almost dead center in the borough’s so-called “core area” of development. It’s surrounded by roads fire trucks have no problem accessing.

So why is this road still this bad?

Back in January when we reported this story — and again this week — we asked and were told that there is a thicket of legal problems that need to be mowed down to reach a solution because some roads in the area were built partially on public land and partially on private land.

The subdivision wasn’t platted properly — government-speak for it doesn’t comply with local regulations. Some structures are straddling property lines, some are built into what would be the public right of way if a road were to be built to avoid crossing private land.

Some have seen this legal miasma and thrown up their hands. We quoted a Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman back in January saying that in fact the borough, and government in general, can’t solve this problem.

Meanwhile, homes burn down and trucks can’t get to them.

One of the neighborhood’s oldest residents, Mike Blodgett, lost his home and business in a fire prior to the two we’ve already discussed. He believes there were two heart attacks on the road that might have been survivable if ambulances hadn’t been hampered in their response.

It’s frustrating to watch this storyline repeat itself over and over again.

This needs to stop. Maybe the borough needs to get over its qualms about interfering with private property rights and condemn some land and replace Pike Avenue with a public roadway that meets borough code. If that is unpalatable to the people who live there, we hope they will work together to offer up a better solution.

We honestly don’t care how it shakes out. We’re just tired of watching our neighbors lose everything because no one can fix a road.