Matanuska River claims house

BUTTE — Chris Wenner spent all day Wednesday watching his house, waiting for it to fall into the Matanuska River.

“We were waiting for it to fall in, but that didn’t happen,” Wenner said.

He and his family waited on the soaked, saturated lawn. They even ordered pizza. And while he said he’s certainly sad to have had to move, having the house finally tip over into the water would actually help his family’s efforts to rebuild.

“The insurance said they’d pay for it once both structures go into the river,” Wenner said.

His house has been the most dramatic of nearly half a dozen situations in the Butte and Sutton where erosion on the Matanuska River has threatened homes and property this summer. The house teetering on the edge is a rental property Wenners own. The main house has a flooded crawl space, but is a few feet farther from the river.

His neighbor moved his house from where it sat on a spot closer to the Old Glenn Highway. The Mat-Su Borough says it is helping Wenner get federal funds to defray the costs to move it to a different piece of land. The money comes from the federal Natural Resource Conservation Service, the same program that paid in 2008 to buy up land along the river.

“We’ve been continually asking for it,” said Frankie Barker, the borough’s environmental planner. “But the federal earmarks are not as frequent as they used to be.”

The borough’s emergency manager, Casey Cook, said that in addition to those two homes in the Butte, three more are threatened in Sutton. One was torn down and moved. Another was demolished as much as it could be. The third is home to a family who doesn’t yet feel compelled to move.

The ground there is saturated, though, said borough spokeswoman Patty Sullivan, and house movers don’t think they could do anything until the ground is frozen anyway.

Cook said the one that was torn down and moved sat in a salvage yard. Of all the properties in danger, it’s that one the state seems most interested in so far.

“(The Department of Environmental Conservation) isn’t really going to get involved unless there’s hazardous materials going into the water,” Cook said, adding the junkyard likely had some of chemicals in the vehicles on the property. “If a home goes into the river like down in Butte then they’ll of course be more involved because now it’s switched resting places from a homeowner property to a state navigable water and they’ll get involved.”

Barker said the borough helped the junkyard owner connect with local people who would help him haul some belongings out of there and hooked him up with free dumping privileges to get the stuff into the borough’s landfill.

Cook said that right now the borough is kind of in a strange flux period. As long as homes are on land, the borough is helping in any way it can to get them moved or otherwise saved.

“We’ve contacted the state emergency operations center just so they could let state DEC know and state (Department of Transportation) and the railroad know that they might have a house floating down or some debris floating down that might affect one of their bridges,” Cook said.

It’s also kind of a strange spot where the borough isn’t sure exactly what to do, he said.

“It’s not widespread enough to be declared a disaster yet. Although it’s a disaster for the homeowner and the property owner, it hasn’t met the benchmarks yet to declare a disaster,” Cook said. “What we can do legally here is limited.”

As for Wenner, he said that until his insurance company pays out he’s paying mortgage for a house he can’t live in.

“I worked on this duplex and did a bunch of remodeling and they’re going to let us stay there for three months now rent-free,” he said.

As this was all going on his wife went through surgery. She’ll be out of work a bit longer. He and his family have a Wells Fargo account set up if anybody wants to help. It’s listed under the Wenners Flooded House in Palmer.

They’re also looking for land on which to rebuild.

“We’d like to stay in the same area,” he said, but away from the river.

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