Residents worried about winter flooding

BUTTE — Homeowners in the center of September’s flooding say they are now worried about slow-moving icing and flooding.

“It’s turning into ice and then as the ice builds up that stops more water and then it comes over the top,” Mat-Su Borough’s Emergency Manager Casey Cook said Friday from the scene of Pat Huddleston’s home along the Matanuska River. “It’s steadily backing up and forcing the water to take new paths.”

Groundwater is also percolating to the surface, Cook said, making the problem worse. He described it as a “very slow flooding process with glaciations along the new channel that the river carved this summer.”

This winter’s fluctuating temperatures haven’t helped he said.

“Hopefully with the warm weather it will alleviate some of that and allow some of the water to flow downstream.”