No flooding yet, but borough officials wary about break-up

PALMER — With a wary eye on Valley rivers and despite a lot of long days pushing slush and thawing out culverts, Mat-Su Borough officials say break-up has been smooth so far.

“As long as the break-up cycle continues to be kind of warm during the day and then it slows down or freezes back up at night, it’ll allow some of that water to soak in or flow back down to tributaries,” said borough emergency manager Casey Cook. “If everything was melting all night long, that’s what we would be concerned about or if it started to rain.”

Over at the Department of Public Works, director Shaune O’Neil said contractors and borough staff have been running pretty hard fixing problems as they crop up. Contractors are scooping out slush to make roads passable and staff members are fielding calls about potholes and ice-choked culverts.

Puddles that start to look like lakes in the middle of a road are often the result of frozen culverts. The borough has its own thaw truck to melt out those ice blockages, and has been trying to take it a step further.

“We’ve been thawing channels in the ice so that the water can move freely,” O’Neil said.

Break-up, she said, wasn’t exactly a surprise for the borough.

“Everybody has known that the snow was going to move eventually, so the contractors have been out there for several weeks.”

Cook said the borough is working to pre-position resources so that they’re closer to the scene if flooding happens. So far none has been reported, but he’s got his eye on those rivers.

“Not so much the bigger rivers, but definitely the smaller tributaries, Willow Creek, Montana Creek,” Cook said.

People tend to live along those creeks, some of them in floodplains, Cook said.

In the next couple of weeks, borough staff will put together a packet of information and a form for homeowners who will need to put sandbags down. Those things will be handed out with sandbags once they’re ready for distribution.

For road problems — potholes, frozen culverts, impassible slushiness — call the standard road maintenance hotline at 745-9826.

“We’d appreciate the public letting us know what’s going on out there because we can’t be everywhere at once,” O’Neil said, though they do try to be everywhere.