Borough reports fires under control, no floods so far

PALMER — The story of the summer for Mat-Su emergency responders has so far been fires and floods, but both seemed to be under control by Monday afternoon.

“Everything’s running high, but it’s not in the flood stage at any of the areas yet that we know of,” Mat-Su Borough Director of Emergency Services Dennis Brodigan said of local rivers. “But we’re monitoring all of the rivers every single day.”

Rivers were running high from Talkeetna to the Butte, but seemed to be holding steady.

“I know that the report on the Matanuska River this morning is that it was down 10 to 14 inches as compared to the weekend,” Brodigan said Monday.

The National Weather Service issued a flood watch over the weekend that was set to expire at 4 p.m., Monday.

“I had to go up to Caswell on Saturday. We dedicated our new fire station up there and I stopped at all the rivers in the area and they were high, but they weren’t overflowing and they haven’t moved us up to a warning yet. It’s still at the watch and the advisory stage,” Brodigan said.

He said there are some areas of particular concern.

“We’ve got some nervous people in Butte with the one dike system off of Maude Road and, of course, Talkeetna is very concerned about their dike system up there,” he said.

The borough continues to seek federal funds to repair the dikes in Talkeetna damaged in flooding last fall. The latest report from the borough’s flood task force indicates that both the Susitna and Talkeetna rivers are undercutting dikes there.

Meanwhile, the state Division of Forestry got something of a reprieve as rains fell over the weekend.

Since Thursday, division crews had been battling a forest fire at Point MacKenzie. The latest reports from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center Monday morning seemed to indicate the 45-acre blaze was more or less under control.

“The fire was mopped up to 100 feet with no visible smokes observed. The Mat-Su crew was reassigned to (the Bitter Creek fire in Tok) and will be (demobilized) in the morning. The plan for the next operational period is to grid to 100 feet and pull hose,” the report says.

The report, which includes all wildfires that drew a response from state Division of Forestry, includes information that no new fires started in the borough over the weekend.

“We’ve been pretty lucky the last, I’m going to say four years, with the relative humidity and cloud cover keeping fires down,” Brodigan said. “We were fortunate with that 45-acre fire on Point MacKenzie (Road) — the Division of Forestry brought the two tankers down and that really, really helped the situation. It would have been a much tougher, probably much larger fire.”

The fire was a weird kind of déjà vu for some local firefighters. Brodigan said that the fire was actually in the path of a previous fire that had scarred the area in 2006. It started where the 2006 fire ended and ended where the older fire started.

“The cabin that burned down — it burned down in both fires,” he said.

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