SWEPT AWAY

SUTTON — The Matanuska River continues to threaten homes as it carves into its bank, sending part of at least one home tumbling into its waters.

George Rauscher, chairman of the Sutton Community Council, said his friend Forrest Blubaugh, who had nervously been watching his back yard fall into the river, called him for help last week.

Rauscher, in turn, called on Eagle Crest Ministries.

“They’re community-minded and they have a ministry of helping out people in the community who can’t afford labor and can’t afford materials,” Rauscher said of Eagle Crest. “I said, ‘We’ve got a battle. Forrest’s house is 10 feet away from the river. It’s not 70 anymore.’”

So Eagle Crest put 24 volunteers to the task. They pulled Blubaugh’s cut firewood back from the bank — though not before he lost three or four cords and the shed he kept it in — and they started emptying out his house at Mile 64 of the Glenn Highway.

Raucher said the river seemed to make a bee-line for Blubaugh’s house, which is now sitting in something of a cove. His neighbors are OK, Rauscher said, at least for now.

“Their houses aren’t as in imminent danger as Forest Blubaugh’s,” Rauscher said. “But they will be if the water keeps going like it is.”

On Thursday, after Blubaugh and the volunteers had moved out everything he cared to keep, the river finally undercut the house.

“It was probably 10 foot or so of the house fell into the river,” Rauscher said.

Blubaugh’s house is an old schoolhouse from Sutton’s mining days. It was hauled to that spot. Several additions have been added. Rauscher said it was one of those additions that fell in.

Blubaugh has left the area, gone to stay with a niece, as he lays plans to move in with his daughter in Oregon, Rauscher said.

The Mat-Su Borough, in a press release, points to the Valley’s wet summer weather as the reason the river has swollen so much. The borough says it is working on the river erosion problem from a number of angles. Emergency responders are called in when evacuation is needed, but there’s also a planning effort afoot to find money to relocate some of the people most threatened by the river. In 2007, the borough did just that, using $500,000 in state and federal money to buy three properties in Sutton.

Also on the planning front, the borough is paying to identify where erosion risk is highest and looking at options for building dikes. The last one built there, the borough reports, cost $580,000.

Homeowners in Circle View and Stampede Estates in Butte put together a community service area and voted to tax themselves to build five dikes. The borough calls that a success story, pointing out that there have been no erosion troubles there this year.

In the short-run, Rauscher, Eagle Crest and the Sutton community in general are keeping an eye on the area’s erosion problem. And whether they will be needed again soon to help another neighbor is anyone’s guess.

“It’s just up to Mother Nature, God and to this river,” Rauscher said.

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