Thank you, Mat-Su Borough staff

To the editor:

Our home was just excluded from the Matanuska River Flood Zone Map by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Mat-SU Borough employee Michelle Olsen made it happen. Olsen shepherded our application through The FEMA “maze of intrigue.” Thank you, Olsen, and thank you borough employees and contractors for creating and validating our borough’s new maps based on laser light and radar technology.

The LIDAR-based map verified the fact that our home was never in danger of flooding. Our family’s federally mandated insurance nightmare began in June 2011 when we were charged $2,489 for a year’s premium by our mortgage company. The insurance policy protects the mortgage company against loss, but provides crumbs for the homeowner. Further, the insurance does not cover losses caused by erosion, which is taking homes along the Glenn and Old Glenn highways.

We had our property surveyed to prove that home was above the flood zone. The full price for the survey was $2,062. The mortgage and insurance companies refused to recognize the results of the survey. Turns out, private insurance policies require a FEMA-approved determination of the probable flood elevation, which was not available for our neighborhood. So the nightmare continued with premiums for 2012 and 2013 that set us back an additional $4,500. Overall, $9,051 is the cost to our family for the three years we were mandated to buy flood insurance because the lower part of our landlocked lakeshore property was considered to be part of the FEMA flood zone.

That is a staggering unanticipated expense for any homeowner or prospective buyer. In hindsight, a little timely planning and zoning should have preserved our Mat-Su flood zones as wildlife corridors and should have spared hundreds of unsuspecting homeowners the cost of federally mandated flood insurance, but that’s a discussion for another day. FEMA has now excluded a couple of dozen qualified properties from our borough’s flood zones. More requests are creeping through the FEMA maze.

We should all be grateful for the persistence of Olsen and her colleagues at the borough. Olsen seems to be available for questions at every public meeting where flood and erosion issues are discussed, no mater the time of day or day of the week. We should all be proud of our public servants. They do important work for all of us. Thanks again, Mat-Su Borough folks.

Sid and Suzanne McCausland

Palmer