November 10 – During the eleven years Aaron Fetter lived in his house, it was always close to the water. But lately it’s been too close.
“If the fence wasn’t there, I could have launched a canoe from my backyard,” Fetter said.
His estate is in a low, swampy part of West Anchorage. Several dozen homes hug DeLong Lake, and even more are tucked into the adjacent wetlands before you reach the edge of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the north.
Lately the water has been rising. The last two years have been unusually wet. The water collects in places where it hasn’t been before, and becomes trapped because the liquid has nowhere to go.
Residents say the situation could worsen if another winter of heavy snow falls. And they say the fault lies not only with nature, but also with the airport. They point to the end of a decades-long informal arrangement in which maintenance workers occasionally ran a pump to drain water from the lakes when they became too swollen.
But the Department of Transportation and Public Utilities, which oversees the airport, says fixing the problem isn’t just their problem. Even if that were the case, the agency says, moving water through wetlands would require all kinds of permits.
Local officials say it fits into a larger story about how poorly built infrastructure from Anchorage’s boom years is aging in ways that are proving difficult and expensive to repair.
But Fetter and some of his neighbors are already seeing water infiltrating their yards, outbuildings and homes.
“We took all the insulation out of our crawl space and dug trenches,” Fetter said. He also gave up part of his waterfront yard and moved his fence back so his dog would no longer wade in. He and his wife removed their back deck this summer and spread 14 tons of gravel to try to build up the garden. After discovering that his crawl space contained “calf deep” water, he installed three sump pumps.
He estimates he has spent about $40,000 so far.
But his real concern is what might happen if he breaks up.
“It’s going to be a nightmare. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that our foundation survives,” Fetter said.
‘The worst it’s ever been’
DeLong Lake gets its name from a caretaker, Joseph S. DeLong, who provided a local school when he was given an 80-acre estate around the lake in 1941.
In the airport’s early days in the 1950s, water flowed from the marshland toward Lake Spenard on the north side. The problems arose in the 1960s, says Fred Klouda, when the airport built a ring road around the site.
“They simply poured gravel and built a roadbed across that wetland, without building a culvert. They essentially created a dam,” Klouda said. “The airport is the cause of it, when they built that road… blocking the natural flow of water.”
Klouda’s parents moved to a house there in 1974, after which he bought it from them and has lived there ever since. But he also worked at the airport for 30 years, including overseeing a large diesel pump that helped drain Meadow Lake, next to DeLong, when the water started to get high.
“I can talk about it because I did it!” Klouda said. “That was one of our regular duties.”
He recalled that after the airport built Tug Road around its property, it added an elevated culvert, through which workers ran a hose to drain water into Lake Spenard. Klouda said it wasn’t necessary every year, but if DeLong or Meadow lakes started to get too high, they would pump around the clock for a few days.
But in 2010, Klouda said, the airport stopped pumping regularly. Since then the water has gradually become higher. The last two wet years have taken things to a new level.
“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” he said.
The hiking trails around the lakes are flooded and only navigable in waders. The water that lands on people’s properties begins to flow onto low-lying residential roads.
So far, most of this has been mostly a nuisance. No homes have yet been made uninhabitable. But at a Sand Lake Community Council meeting last month, resident Richard Walsh warned that people living closest to the water fear “imminent damage” to their homes as a result of the breakup.
“If the water doesn’t get pumped out now and snow falls this winter, we’re going to be in a worse situation this spring,” Walsh said.
He estimates that 15 to 20 properties are currently affected. Walsh has contacted local, state and federal officials to try to resolve the situation, but nothing tangible has come of it yet.
He helped get a resolution before the City Council calling on the Alaska Department of Transportation to expedite permits that would allow the airport’s interim director, Angie Spear, to “immediately install a temporary diver and to approve the activation of a pump to facilitate the movement of water out of the port.” wetlands to Airport Stormwater System.”
The resolution was approved, but there has been no communication from airport administrators or elected officials since.
“No one here is looking for anything other than (for) the airport to address the problem and maybe make an infinitesimal effort to help the neighbors,” Walsh said.
‘A gigantic list of overdue maintenance’
State transportation officials, who are in charge of the airport, say the problem is not theirs alone to solve.
“It’s really going to take the agencies working together,” said Shannon McCarthy, spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.
According to her, the situation involves the municipality, the state, the residents and the licensing authorities.
“Water drainage is complicated,” McCarthy said.
Federal and state environmental regulations prevent property managers from discharging water from wetlands wherever convenient.
If the airport were to drain the lakes, McCarthy said, they would have to go through an official permitting process. That’s part of what they determined this summer after running the equipment for a few days at the neighbors’ request before turning it off, telling residents they didn’t have the necessary permits.
McCarthy said pumping used to be done informally.
As a method, she added, it’s a “visual thing… but it doesn’t always make a difference.” It would take a pump running 24 hours a day for about a month to lower the water level in DeLong Lake by a foot, she said.
“Whether it’s been done in the past or not, it’s not necessarily a good solution,” McCarthy said.
The department will meet internally with technical experts, including a hydrologist, to determine drainage patterns. Then it will loop around the community as it develops a plan, McCarthy said.
Anchorage Municipal Manager Becky Windt Pearson said the city believes most of the responsibility lies with the airport. She has contacted government officials and is conducting an internal investigation into “any municipal interest there that could bind us.” But, she said, the city’s options are limited.
“The long-term solution is to get some kind of drainage out of it,” said Assemblymember Anna Brawley, who represents the area.
More immediately, Brawley said she believes the airport should intervene.
Much of that area is low and has drainage problems, Brawley said. The area lakes provide quaint homes and easy recreation. But responsible development requires good water management, which is one reason why housing is more expensive today than it was decades ago, she said.
And before 1975, when the city and the borough of Anchorage merged, many of the borough’s outlying areas built infrastructure hastily, partially or shoddily. Roads were “cobbled,” she said, with no culverts or systems to allow for natural drainage patterns.
Those original roads are aging and many have never been improved or updated.
“It’s basically a giant deferred maintenance list,” Brawley said.
Southcentral Alaska is getting wetter. The warming climate puts more moisture in the air, one of the reasons Anchorage experiences snowier winters. If there are drainage problems now, Brawley says, they are likely to get worse in the coming decades.
