Neighbors asking what’s the source of ‘Spinell Creek’?

WASILLA — There’s a lot of water bubbling up on Settler’s Bay Drive on the extreme north end of a housing development there. Or at least there was before it froze.

The source of that water depends on whom you ask.

Dameon Kowalke lives across the street. He blames Spinell Homes. The land was swampy when Spinell built on it and he suspects construction punctured a natural spring which has flooded yards in the neighborhood for several months.

“It’s a creek now. They’ve built Spinell Creek,” he said.

But that’s not at all how Spinell sees it. There’s no spring there, the company says. It’s just bad drainage. The ditches there — Mat-Su Borough-maintained ditches — don’t drain well, and haven’t since long before Spinell built its house. Bad drainage in a wet area causes problems, the company says.

“That has been a natural seep on that bench there,” said Sam Brown, Spinell’s Valley supervisor. “If you walk around everyone’s house back there, water comes out of the ground.”

Before Spinell built, he pointed out, all of the neighboring lots drained onto that lot rather than into the ditches. Brown said the company is willing to build a drain across the road to behind Kowalke’s house to drain that area into Crocker Creek.

“The offer has been put on the table,” he said, but not to everyone. “We’re not talking to the unreasonable people.”

He’s not saying the company would do that out of the goodness of its heart. Spinell needs the drainage, too.

“We need to drain our lot off,” Brown said. “We’re happy to spend the money to make our lot buildable.”

But Kowalke says he isn’t buying what Spinell says about the drainage issues. He said that, yes, Settler’s Bay has been known to have water issues, but this neighborhood, as far as anyone can tell, has only had one problem and that was in 2008 when someone punctured a water line and flooded the street.

It was never this bad just through natural drainage, Kowalke said.

“We are away above what’s normal,” he said.

For his part, Brown points out this wasn’t a normal winter or summer. There was record snowfall last winter and severe flooding in the Mat-Su in September. But it was damp throughout, starting with the melting of the snowpack.

But, Kowalke said, since the problems started when the house went in, the cause seems obvious to him.

“Somebody collectively has allowed this to happen,” he said. “So now we need to figure out who collectively is going to fix it.”

The ditches in front of the house are now filled with ice. The borough has told him it will come out to thaw them to get water moving if it has to this winter. Kowalke said that means the cost to fix the problem will be dispersed across the wider borough tax base.

Amy Gardner lives up the road. She said that this summer when her puppy was potty training she went looking for spots he might have gone. She found a puddle, but it didn’t seem to have come from the dog.

She looked in the crawlspace and that’s when she found six inches of water. Until 3 a.m., she sat in the basement hand-triggering her sump pump. Flooding remained an issue for the next two and a half weeks, she said. Now she’s worried about mold at a time when she was planning on moving out.

“What are we going to do when we try to sell it?” she asked. “We’re not going to get our money out of it.”

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