Winds, ice, close local schools

WASILLA — With temperatures up, snow melting and roads turning icy, schools in the Valley were closed for two days this week, but otherwise most everyone reported relative calm.

“It’s been a very slow day from our standpoint — which is a good thing,” Clint Vardeman, the borough’s deputy director of emergency services, said Thursday afternoon.

Usually when the roads get icy, Vardeman said the borough expects to see a spike in car accidents. But so far the only trouble the ice caused was with ambulances losing traction on routine calls.

“The side roads are still bad and we have had to use our plowing support truck to get the ambulance in and out of some places,” Vardeman said.

Over at Matanuska Electric Association, spokeswoman Lorali Carter said the utility was working to keep the lights on as winds gusting up to 60 mph hit the Valley.

Carter said the cooperative was dealing with “continued scattered outages throughout the service territories just due to these irregular weather conditions.”

She said the largest was in Eagle River, affecting about 200 customers.

Shortly before 10 a.m., a tree fell on a power line at 49th State Street at Ortner Loop. Emergency crews directed traffic as MEA linesman made their way out.

“They’re repairing about eight feet of line there,” Carter said shortly after 11 a.m. when crews had already announced over the radio that the tree had been removed. “There are only about 60 people out of power.”

Perhaps the largest effect the weather had was on the school district that closed every school with the exception of Glacier View Elementary both Wednesday and Thursday.

While it might seem that snow closes schools more often than ice, school district spokeswoman Catherine Esary said that “snow is not usually the problem. It is the icy roads, because it’s so undeterminable you can’t look at a road and say that it’s icy.”

Alaska State Troopers advised not sending busses out onto the streets so the district took that advice.

She said the district works a handful of snow days into its schedule.

“The end of the school year is a provisional date,” Esary said. “If we don’t use the snow days then we dismiss on the earlier date.”

She said as of Thursday afternoon that the district’s best guess was that school would be in session this morning. But that’s what district officials thought Wednesday night, too.

She said Superintendent George Troxel and Henry Cottle, who is in charge of operations and maintenance, will monitor the situation throughout the night and confer at 10 p.m. to see what they think the situation warrants.

Vardeman said it sounds like the winds at least will continue into tonight.

Reports from Anchorage indicate that city got the worst of the weather.

“It rarely happens that way and they can have it,” Vardeman joked.

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