Wild weather highlights best of Valley life: We help each other

Spend enough time at the Mat-Su Borough’s Emergency Operations Center in Wasilla, and it quickly becomes apparent — a lot of these people haven’t slept in quite some time.

When asked, a lot of them will insist they’ve slept, but then admit it’s only been for two or three hours.

One responder in particular kept saying he was leaving to catch some sleep in the fire station’s upstairs crew quarters, but would inevitably pop up again 10 minutes later in the middle of some other task that needed to be accomplished.

And those are just the people running logistics.

Events like this week’s flooding run the borough’s water rescue crew ragged. They were out paddling boats through a cul-de-sac north of Wasilla in the middle of the night. Then we heard them on the scanner the next afternoon trying to find a house that was floating down Willow Creek. But it’s also kind of an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation.

On the radio we heard pages for “all available responders” more than once on Thursday. Firefighters, rescuers and medics went to their home stations if they could. They’re needed to fill sandbags, clear fallen trees, or knock on doors and tell people it’s time to evacuate.

Cops are out making sure people are safe. Officers in Palmer, we heard, actually crossed outside city limits to check on people camping near the Matanuska River.

Meanwhile, crews of linemen are busting their humps throughout the borough. If your power went out and came back on, chances are some lineman who you’ll probably never get to thank cleared trees from the lines and got it turned back on for you.

It is days and weeks like these that we really feel grateful to live in a place like the Mat-Su Borough, where teams of well-trained people are on hand to help when we need it.

Some, like the linemen, do it professionally. Others, like the medics and firefighters, do it for very little money.

But all of them have done a bang-up job during this weeks-long spate of terrible weather, and they have our deepest thanks.

It takes a special type of person to run toward a flooded river when any sane person would run away from it. We’re glad we have plenty of them to rely on.

The weather is bad, but the company is good. As much as we dislike such weather, we are pleased for the chance it gives us to show off the best part of life in the Mat-Su Valley: We help each other.