Dangling home to be destroyed

BUTTE — In the end of what was a years-long saga, the bank that currently owns a house dangling over the Matanuska River has told officials it intends to demolish it.

“Wells Fargo, it is my understanding, foreclosed on the property and will have the house demolished when (the state Department of Transportation) is finished with their riprap work their project along the bike trail,” said Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Warren Keogh, who represents the area.

DOT has said previously that it plans to wrap up work protecting the Old Glenn Highway and its bike path by the end of this month.

Mat-Su Borough Manager John Moosey confirmed that the bank intended to take the house down.

“I think that’s absolutely great that they’re stepping up and taking responsibility making sure the thing doesn’t fall in the river if it doesn’t have to,” Moosey said.

The home is formerly the property of the Wenner family, who left the state this summer after a string of horrific luck continued with a rental home they moved into catching fire.

The house became iconic during the 2012 fall flooding in the Valley, appearing on newscasts and in newspapers statewide. But erosion, not flooding was the Wenners’ problem. Before the floods hit, a second building on the property spent weeks frozen in mid-fall, the east end high in the air, the west end halfway down the bank.

The main home, dangling as it is over the river, continues to be the go-to image to illustrate erosion and flooding along the Matanuska.

“What a mess for them, when they basically did everything right,” Keogh said, noting that the Wenners paid their mortgage on time and had insurance.

Protecting that road is the reason the state has been in the area this summer installing big so-called armor rock or riprap to keep the river from undercutting the highway.

The Mat-Su Borough has $2 million in hand to do something about the river. A plan to expand a service area for dikes in the Circle View area to encompass areas of the Butte failed to pass muster at the borough assembly earlier this month.

So what’s the borough going to do with that money? Moosey said it is still deciding. He said the borough is requesting proposals for the Sutton and the Maud Road areas.

“We are actively seeking some professional advice and see what we have authority to do and see how we can make this work,” he said. “Essentially, we’re throwing it out to the people who know best.”

He said most ideas are on the table, but the borough doesn’t want to be put into a situation of incurring a lot of ongoing costs. And $2 million sounds like a lot, but it might not go very far.

For instance, dikes, the borough has been told, cost about $1,000 per lineal foot. Riprap work like DOT is doing would cost between $8 million and $9 million to do everything needed in the Butte.

Whatever the solution is, Moosey said it has to be one in which the borough is “not in a situation where we’re creating more and more costs each year so it doesn’t have any future budget impacts. That’s the needle that we’re trying to thread, having an impact without any ongoing costs.”

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