Substandard roads pose life, safety risks

We are frequently impressed with the spirit and resiliency we encounter in people we meet while reporting the news.

This was true again Thursday with the Hvamstad family. Rarely do we hear laughter when talking to victims of events as recent and difficult to overcome as the death of a young family member from cancer, followed by losing everything in a house fire the next month.

We don’t fault victims who are morose and upset. But the Hvamstads were laughing and joking. They said they were just happy to be together, unharmed and have been amazed each day by the generosity of their neighbors. This sort of zest for life, even in the face of adversity, is worthy of admiration.

One part of their story, though, was just as surprising, but much less wonderful. The Hvamstads live on Pike Avenue. They are the family we wrote about in the Tuesday edition whose home was nearly impossible for firefighters to reach. In the end, crews strung 1,000 feet of hose to shoot down the flames.

If you’ve never driven on Pike Avenue, chances are good you know the neighborhood, just a half-mile from Bogard Road and connects with Bear Street.

But did you know there are still roads this close to the Mat-Su’s core area that are only 13-feet wide and that have bridges made from repurposed flatbed rail cars? That’s not wide enough for a fire truck to turn around or send more than one to respond to a fire.

We understand that there are many such roads in the borough, but we were surprised to find this one is the core area, the densest part of our borough. While this type of “pioneer road” may work OK in Caswell or other sparsely populated areas, it’s not sufficient inside a road service area where fire trucks, ambulances, school buses and passenger vehicles also routinely share the road.

Borough officials say they have been stymied fixing what’s become a hairball of an issue that includes private property rights and funding problems. Fixing it would probably be beyond the means of the local road service area.

Neighbors say people have died on that road for want of an ambulance that couldn’t reach them in time. Others, like the Hvamstads, watched helplessly as their homes went up in smoke; knowing they couldn’t get fire insurance if they wanted to because of the access problem.

This is a reminder of why regulations are important. A reminder about how the dimensions of any road constructed in the borough impact our lives and safety. People’s lives are in the balance and these roads, though easier and cheaper to construct, can sometimes be nigh on impossible to fix.

We hope that the newly finished rewrite of the Mat-Su Borough’s subdivision codes will prove a useful tool to limit — or prohibit — construction of more sub-standard roads like Pike Avenue.