Valley car-bear accidents leave residents edgy

PALMER — A black bear killed on the Old Glenn Highway early this month means that two bears had run-ins with traffic in the most densely populated areas of the borough in less than a week.

According to Cmdr. Tom Remaley with the Palmer Police Department, the bear was hit at night on Sept. 4.

“It was just this side of the (Matanuska) River bridge down there in that swamp area before you get to the campgrounds,” Remaley said. “I don’t think anybody in the vehicle was injured. The bear was injured. He had a broken back so the officers dispatched it, put it out of its misery and called the troopers.”

The troopers, in turn, called a charitable organization, which came and salvaged the carcass. Remaley said Phill Krause was the officer who put the bear down and that a report on the incident was on his desk in the morning — just like it is every time an officer has to fire his weapon outside of marksmanship training.

In his 17 years with the department, Remaley said, he can only remember one other time when officers had to put down a bear, and that was sometime around 1993.

“It just doesn’t happen a lot here,” he said. “We get a lot of moose calls.”

Moose can usually be shooed away and rarely have to be put down. If police needed to capture a bear, Remaley said, they would likely call in someone with more expertise, like a biologist.

The other bear to be hit by a car was a grizzly on Seward Meridian on Aug. 30. Witnesses say it rolled up on the hood of a car, then took off into a nearby creek.

In the wake of that incident, the Frontiersman was flooded with bear sightings reported via e-mail, on Facebook and over the phone.

Catherine Esary, school district spokeswoman, said that the bear, or maybe some other bear, had apparently been around for a while in the area and that Larson Elementary, Teeland Middle School and Finger Lake Elementary were all notified that a bear might be in the area.

The principal at Larson, she said, kept kids in from recess on a few days and sent out a message to parents, letting them know to be careful with students who bike or walk to school.

“I don’t think that it’s normally been this prevalent a problem in the core area,” Esary said.

That grizzly also briefly had Remaley on edge. He lives near there and it seems like for a couple of weeks bears were being spotted in subdivisions all around his.

“That’s just what I need a brown bear walking across the yard,” he said.

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