Flooding problem worsens

WASILLA — A geyser of water shot out of a flooded, glaciated yard in Settler’s Bay Wednesday as multiple homes flooded and Mat-Su Borough crews scrambled to put in a temporary fix.

“I was just getting ready to get back out there,” Dameon Kowalke said by phone from his home on Settler’s Bay Drive Thursday. “I’ve been shoveling snow, pushing the water, just trying to keep it from coming back into the house.”

It’s become a full time job.

“I’ve been working like 10-hour days for the last three days,” he said.

He said earlier in the week that a half-dozen homes were threatened or had already taken in water. The road had to be closed.

A Thursday afternoon press release from the Mat-Su Borough says that a seven-man borough road crew had been out there the day before, steaming through 15 inches of ice to find “the elusive end of a privately owned yard drain pipe.”

When they found the pipe, the borough said, a geyser of water shot out of the yard.

“The moving water is believed to be what has been flooding yards and icing up driveways and the road,” according to the borough. “(Mat-Su Borough Department of) Public Works has extended the pipe by adapting it to a flexible plastic tube and running it from the private property, across the road, in order to divert the flowing water behind homes toward Crocker Creek.”

Kowalke said he’s dug a “moat” between his house and his neighbor’s house to get the water flowing through there.

“That helped a lot,” he said. “It gave the water somewhere to go, but it’s still just pouring out into the street from off of that lot.”

As for the tube connected to that drain pipe — the borough says it’s helping, but the borough is looking for alternate solutions. Thursday, crews were cutting channels down into the 15-inch-thick ice so they could pry it up and haul it away.

As for where the water is coming from?

Well, that’s a matter of debate. Earlier in the winter when neighbors started getting fed up with the growing ice patch, two competing sides laid out alternate theories.

Neighborhood homeowners point out that the problems started this summer when a home across the street from Kowalke went in. Kowalke has said he believes it’s gushing out of an underground creek that the homebuilders cracked open.

On the other side, the owner of that home, Spinell Homes, has said in previous interviews that the problem is a drainage issue. The drainage ditches in place to move water off the lot, maintained by the borough, just don’t work. Lots in the area used to drain onto the lot with the new house, but now that water doesn’t have anywhere to go to.

Spinell says it would like to build a drain under the road and past Kowalke’s house to a pond back there, but hasn’t gotten very far when trying to propose that solution to neighbors.

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