Erosion nibbles away at patience

BUTTE — Months before Susitna Valley rivers and streams began overrunning their banks this week, homeowners in the Butte and Sutton began keeping a wary eye on their river — the Matanuska.

While the recent rains and subsequently flooding have certainly sped the process, what homeowners along the Matanuska are worried about isn’t that the river will jump its banks, but that it will undercut them and their homes.

It happened to the Wenner family. The couple lost one of two buildings on their property along the Old Glenn Aug. 27. The other is full of water, just waiting to fall into the river.

“I don’t know why these people are sitting here so calmly,” Chris Wenner said Monday at a meeting in Butte Elementary to discuss the erosion problem. “These people are going to lose their homes before anything happens.”

Monday, of course, was before rivers started flooding homes in Talkeetna, Willow, Houston and Wasilla. As of Friday, the second home on the Wenners’ property seemed poised to be swept into the water, too. A home in Sutton that was partially washed away in a pervious summer was completely swept away this week.

“You know what you’ve got to do,” Wenner told state officials.

The consensus in the room seemed to be that the river carries sediment and gravel downstream, which is deposits until it raises the level of the riverbed so much that the river starts carving a new channel.

The solution, then, is simple — dig out that gravel.

Gravel is a pretty valuable commodity, resident argued. The river has the potential to be a renewable resource as a gravel mine, but there is a lot of red tape to navigate to get there.

Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss was at the meeting to thank the man who put it together — Rep. Bill Stoltze, R-Butte — for a piece of legislation he said would make it easier to extract that gravel. DeVilbiss said the borough is working on a plan for the erosion problem.

Wynn Meneffee, deputy director of the state Division of Mining, Land and Water, explained that until the legislation Stoltze put forward, the state had to charge a fee for the gravel. The rocks, after all, are state property. Now, the commissioner for the Department of Natural Resources can authorize letting the gravel go for free if there’s a public interest in doing so.

But it would still be a private entity that would mine the gravel.

“DNR does not have any funds to actually do those projects,” Meneffee said. “What we’re funded for is to authorize those projects.”

Some in the room testified that during past attempts to start such an operation the obstacle seemed to be not DNR, but the state Department of Fish and Game.

Stoltze noted that while the legislation passed, it did so just barely.

“That just got through the Legislature by the skin of its teeth,” he said. “Not everyone is as common-sense as the people in this room.”

He said there were numerous efforts throughout the process of pushing it through to either kill the bill or render it toothless. He predicted that once people start trying to dredge in the river, environmental groups will probably file lawsuits.

Gravel extraction and the borough’s plan are long-term solutions. What about now?

That would be the purview of the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. Two deputy commissioners were at the table from that department, McHugh Pierre and Michael O’Hare.

Both said that to get money to help homeowners in danger, there needs to be some kind of a disaster declared. To declare a disaster, Pierre said, by statute there needs to be some kind of “event,” like a storm or an earthquake. O’Hare agreed.

“This is a long-term erosion issue,” O’Hare said. “By definition, it is not an event.”

Pat Huddleson didn’t seem satisfied with that answer. She lives downriver from where the Wenners used to live. The Wenner’s house floated downriver about a mile and came to rest on a sandbar in view of her property. She said she felt like her concerns are getting passed from one agency to another.

“Everyone’s moving like snails and nobody’s doing anything,” she said.

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