Borough patches Butte dike

BUTTE — Flooding has returned to the Matanuska River, sending Mat-Su Borough employees out to patch a hole in a dike.

“Public works went out last night and filled in the breach along Maud Road,” Mat-Su Borough Emergency Manager Casey Cook said Thursday. “They put in a bunch of gravel and riprap to plug the hole basically.”

He said that the hole in the dike had been there since September, when every major river and creek in the borough flooded. The Matanuska River in particular had opened a new channel, pushing through the Maud Road dike and flooding homes downstream.

As of Thursday, Cook said, it didn’t seem like downstream homes were in danger again.

“If it starts moving toward the homes because it’s looking for the easiest access then homes will be in danger, but now it seems to be holding steady,” Cook said. “The repairs were to help it hold the situation it’s in.”

He said that winter has been kind of a mixed bag where flooding is concerned.

“With the deep freeze we had it was bad because then the water had to find some place to go and it was seeking out the path of least resistance,” Cook said. “It’s been nice to have some warm days to let that water dissipate.”

The patch on the dike is a temporary fix, he said, put in place while the borough waits for possible flood relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. The damage is one of the items for which the borough is working on a FEMA “project worksheet.”

“That was one of the project worksheets that we hadn’t completed yet, so we’ll do a temporary repair on it probably until the summer after the project worksheet is written and approved,” he said.

He said the current wrangling in Congress over federal disaster funding shouldn’t affect the Mat-Su.

“Once it reaches a certain level then it has to have Congressional approval,” he said. “Ours was already approved and fit within that framework for recovery costs.”

But other Alaska disaster victims weren’t as lucky. In a press release, Sen. Mark Begich points out that along with the money to help the East Coast recover from Hurricane Sandy is money to help Alaskans who were impacted by this summer’s disastrously low salmon runs and who might need to clean up debris from the Japanese tsunami.

“I’m very disappointed House leadership has chosen to put their own politics over the needs of those impacted by Hurricane Sandy and other natural disaster victims, including the thousands of Alaska fishermen hurt by the Chinook disaster last summer,” Begich says in a press release. “Yet again, the Senate did its work and passed a disaster bill with bipartisan support and now the House has punted it.”

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