Sutton residents continue battle against the mighty Matanuska

SUTTON — On a sunny late-summer afternoon in Sutton, the Matanuska River ate the riverbank on one side of a house while construction workers busily worked to save a thoroughfare on the other.

The Williams property had been less than 10 yards from the river’s main channel as recently as July 25. The channel eddied around near the back of the house Aug. 12, and one portion of the property visibly slumps toward the river. The river’s level had actually retreated off portions of the property previously covered in water, and owner Lynn Williams said the modified trailer could survive until the 2016 spring thaw – if conditions don’t deteriorate any further.

She’s pretty positive for someone whose front yard holds an emergency construction project that likely won’t save her property.

“If the river does come — I don’t think it’s going to this year, but next spring, when it breaks — they’ll have some kind of protection for the highway,” she said on Wednesday, August 12.

On the Glenn Highway side of the house, dump trucks and excavators rumbled, clanked, and beeped as employees for Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities contractor Hamilton Excavating deposited “rip-rap” rock extracted from a Chugiak quarry. What used to be the driveway to the house is now a muddy trench filled with rocks and river water. Hydrology studies show that bedrock bordering the Matanuska is on the other side of the highway, where numerous properties displayed “For Sale” signs from local real estate agents.

The work to save the Glenn momentarily impeded the ability of a contractor to remove critical portions of the one-story white house and a nearby shed, Williams said.

“I’ve got a gentleman going in tomorrow that’s going to start gutting the wood structures, and start taking out windows and wood and everything that they can possibly use and to try and get this to be as much as a reduction of debris as possible, because I’m responsible for taking it to the dump,” she said. “The only issue with them there is nobody can get on the property to start removing stuff.”

Even that constitutes a relatively minor annoyance, Williams said.

“In these kind of things, I can’t be too demanding,” she said. “I mean, the river’s kind of got its own say here, and it’s doing what it wants. They’re looking out for protecting the highway, which would mess up a lot of people up in Tok, Valdez that come this way quite a bit. I would give in there and say the inconvenience is okay for right now, because if that road got washed out, I know people who come back and forth.”

The Williams place was added to the list of properties for a potential buyout using FEMA and grant money.

“(Borough Emergency Manager) Casey Cook actually told me he was going to put me on the list,” she said. “I did not know anything about it, and of course this was a shock and a surprise, so I was really grateful to him that he was gonna do that.

She doesn’t have flood insurance for the property currently perched precariously on the river’s edge.

“I couldn’t really get the insurance on that property because it’s spendy, being next to the river,” she said.

The buyout program has been on borough officials’ radar since severe flooding in 2012, and water last year had pushed officials in the direction of putting things on paper.

When borough officials and Boutet Company grant consultant Jim Jager met with property owners last year, they stressed applying for flood insurance as an important first step in moving forward. Property owners applied for some funding, but federal officials awarded no grants in the first round of applications this year.

Buyout money doesn’t work on the river’s timetable, Jager said. Borough officials will have to inventory and rank the numerous applicants for the program. At-risk properties in Alaska compete with properties in more densely populated states for limited federal funds, Jager said. The borough is presently applying for two grants that will cover up to 75 percent of the buyout costs (estimated at about $9 million), and borough officials won’t receive notification of successful applications until early 2016. Negotiations with property owners could take additional months.

‘These negotiations can be quite complicated and will involve many factors beyond price; including whether structures will be moved or demolished, responsibility for site remediation, sale-closing schedules, etc.,” Jager wrote in an email.

All told, the program could take as long as 18 months from the point of grant notifications, meaning the ultimate completion of a buyout program could be as late as 2017.

Accepting the grant could take as little as two months, and borough officials could work in the meantime using general fund money to speed up the process, Cook said.

“That’s a possibility, I would think,” he said. “That’s our finance department that would really make a determination on that. … If we got the grant, once we got word of it, we would definitely start work.”

A request for proposal would go out upon notification, Cook said.

Federal funds would join state funds disbursed in the past to help with flood mitigation. Alaska Rep. Jim Colver (R-Valdez) surveyed the DOT project, and said he’s worked to get $2.1 million disbursed to the borough for flood mitigation efforts – money which he hasn’t seen along the banks yet.

“The borough kind of studied here, studied there,” he said.

In the meantime, Colver said he’s working with Alaska Gov. Bill Walker to find a short-term solution.

“What’s it gonna take to get rock and make it available so people can protect that shoreline?” he said. “Because just a little bit of rock on that shoreline will hold it.”

Contact Reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.