Bureaucracies stymie couple’s recovery

BUTTE — To call the saga of the Wenners and their house hanging halfway over a edge of the Matanuska River a roller-coaster ride might actually be a mistake.

Roller coaster implies peaks and valleys of emotion. And it seems like at every turn the Wenners have stayed in that valley since erosion forced them out of their home in July.

“I just think that the steps we took were being good citizens in that we were trying not to pollute the river,” Daina Mirsch-Wenner said Monday. “It wasn’t like we abandoned the whole structure. We’re still paying mortgage. We haven’t even abandoned it now.”

This summer, the Matanuska River took a turn and started heading directly for the Wenner house. Over the course of the past five months it ate through the trees before finally taking out a smaller home on the property and severely undercutting the main house. The home is currently dangling over the river. In fact, when the crawl space door is lifted, the river is visible beneath it, Mirsch-Wenner said.

The Wenners evacuated weeks before heavy flooding inundated their neighbors with standing water as fall floods had every major Valley river overrunning its banks in September.

All summer the Wenners have been banging their heads against various bureaucracies in the private and public sector. The latest they’ve heard was from their insurance company, Hartford Flood Insurance Company of the Midwest, which, in late November, wrote to offer them $37,000 for the damage to their home.

“I was not allowed to write up the entire home, just the damage,” their adjuster wrote in an Nov. 19 e-mail.

Mirsch-Wenner said she was flabbergasted.

“There is no way we can repair and move back into the house! Why did we even have flood Insurance if this is the answer? If I sign this I will have to go bankrupt in order to pay off our mortgage,” she replied.

Soon after she consulted with a lawyer, John Pharr out of Anchorage, who wrote a letter on her behalf.

“This offer is totally unacceptable, as repair of the house as proposed is not only not physically possible, but not even legal,” Pharr wrote, giving the insurers 10 days to reply or face legal action.

Those 10 days were up this week. Mirsch-Wenner said and she has a call in to Pharr.

Meanwhile, the state of Alaska has officially denied her claim for help under the disaster relief offered to victims of the September flooding. The state claims what ate away at the Wenner property was erosion. As evidence, it points to the Wenners’ evacuation of the house weeks before the flooding.

The Wenners are appealing that decision, hoping they can convince somebody that their July move wasn’t a complete evacuation.

“We were there on a daily basis making sure that things were removed that wouldn’t go down the river,” she said. “Theoretically we could have probably lived there. We could have just been flushing our sewage down the river.”

Those are things they could have done, but, trying to be responsible neighbors, they chose not to, she said.

She said that people were upset when the smaller house — she calls it their “cottage” — went down the river. She said she doesn’t want to upset the community further by letting the bigger house follow it down river. But if that’s what it takes to get the insurers to write off the whole house and not just $37,000 in damages, she’s prepared to do it.

Meanwhile, she’s had to borrow money to make rent. Her take-home of $2,400 is just over the $2,100 she has to pay each month in mortgage and rent.

“We should be good for January and February rent but if we’re not resolved by March we’re going to be in another pickle again,” Mirsch-Wenner said. ““It’s just really frustrating.”

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