Homes fall into river, prompt questions

What are we going to do about the Matanuska River?

It’s a question a lot of people and organizations are asking themselves. A few have already come up with possible answers. For two homeowners in the Butte and two more in Sutton, the answer is to resign yourself to losing your property, be it your land or your house.

Parts of two homes have already fallen into the water. It looks like a third will fall any day now.

The Mat-Su Borough is doing what it can, providing sandbags to buy time for an evacuation and helping move one house out of the way of the water.

Some wonder if the borough could be doing more. Others wonder if it should even try.

Isn’t it, after all, the responsibility of the homeowner to either not build in the way of a voracious, bank-chewing river or to get his stuff out of the way when the river turns toward his property?

Sure. Personal responsibility is a big part of this.

At least one family, the Wenners, have displayed tons of personal responsibility, moving out of their home, finding a new one, getting all the utilities shut off and not getting anyone hurt or killed in the process.

They also removed the fuel tanks, thankfully. But the septic tank is still there, sitting in saturated ground inches from the swelling Matanuska River. Even if they hired a truck to pump it out, it couldn’t get to the house or to the septic tank without sinking in the mud.

We’d say they’ve done all they can. The septic tank is beyond their grasp now; asking the Wenners to shoulder what we assume would be a huge financial burden to remove it would be unreasonable.

But with the water chewing away more and more of the bank, that septic tank, it seems to us, is likely to wind up in the water. Is it the state or borough’s job to keep that from happening when a homeowner can’t?

We would think it is, at least in the interest of public health. In 2007 the borough paid to snatch up a few properties in an erosion-plagued portion of Sutton. The borough used $590,000 of federal money then.

We hope similar financial resources can be attained this year to help keep septic tanks — and similar contaminants — out of the river.

No one knows when the river’s hunger will be sated. How much land will it devour before its seasonal Matanuska Valley buffet ends?

Looking at the aerial photos of this portion of the river, it seems we don’t have long to figure out how we will deal with the Mat River when it develops a taste for the Old Glenn Highway and begins lapping at its edges.

The river has claimed homes here for decades. And always we decry the homeowners who bought or built there. What will we say when this river comes to gobble up the highway? As a community, we must stop pointing fingers and assigning blame and work toward solutions that serve our common interest.