Rare winter flooding strikes Butte

BUTTE — River water poured into the lower level of one home Sunday morning, but the water seemed to be retreating by mid-day Monday.

“The word I got is that the water has stopped flowing through the yard and has dissipated,” Mat-Su Borough Emergency Manager Casey Cook said shortly before 2 p.m., Monday.

He said that as of then, there was no standing water outside the home at Mile 13.5, Glenn Highway.

“It’s pretty much just a big ice skating rink out there around the building now,” Cook said.

That was not the case Dec. 15. Butte Fire Department volunteers arrived Sunday morning and began helping the family place sandbags around the house, dig channels and evacuate some pets.

Cook said the Mat River has flooded the property before, but never during the winter.

“It’s always unusual to get flowing water in your house in December,” Cook said.

Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Jim Sykes, who represents the area, also was on scene as well Sunday. He said the fire department did some plowing to try to get the water flowing in a different direction and also helped place about 300 sandbags.

Cook described the property as one main building and eight or nine outbuildings. He said water did flow into the yard of a nearby house and the yard of a nearby recreational cabin, but that it hadn’t entered any other homes.

Cook said he thought the problem might be the channels that run through ice in the area.

“The water still has to go somewhere once those get blocked up,” he said. “Hopefully, either we’ll get a warm up spell or something to unplug those pipes again.”

Butte resident Pat Huddleson, who maintains a Facebook page about flooding from Miles 13 to 15 on the Old Glenn, said the water is flooding the bike path, but her property is still dry.

“All we want here along the Matanuska River for Christmas is protection from the river,” she wrote.

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

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.