Increasing lake flooding near Anchorage airport could damage homes, owners warn

During the 11 years Aaron Fetter has lived in his house, it’s always been close to the water. But lately, it’s been too close.

“If the fence wasn’t there, I could have launched a canoe out of my backyard,” Fetter said.

His property sits in a low, marshy part of West Anchorage. Several dozen homes press up against DeLong Lake, with more nestled into the wetlands abutting it before you hit the edge of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the north.

Recently, the water has risen. The last two years have been abnormally wet. Water is pooling in places it hasn’t before, trapped because the liquid has nowhere to go.

Residents say the situation could worsen if there is another winter of heavy snow. And they say fault lies not just with nature, but with the airport. They point to the end of a decadeslong informal arrangement wherein maintenance workers would occasionally run a pump to drain water from the lakes when they got too swollen.

But the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, which oversees the airport, says it’s not their problem alone to fix. Even if it was, the agency says, moving water around wetlands requires all kinds of permits.

Local officials say it fits into a larger story of how poorly built infrastructure from Anchorage’s boom years is aging in ways that are proving hard and expensive to fix.

But Fetter and some of his neighbors are already seeing water infiltrate their yards, outbuildings and houses.

“We pulled all the insulation out of our crawl space. We dug trenches,” Fetter said. He’s also ceded a portion of his yard to the water, moving his fence back so his dog would stop wading in. He and his wife removed their back deck and spread 14 tons of gravel fill this summer to try to build up the yard. After discovering his crawl space had “calf deep” water, he installed three sump pumps.

He estimates he’s spent around $40,000 so far.

But his real worry is what could happen come breakup.

“It’s going to be a nightmare. We’re kind of fingers crossed that our foundation survives,” Fetter said.

‘The worst it’s ever been’

DeLong Lake gets its name from a janitor, Joseph S. DeLong, who took care of a local school when he got an 80-acre homestead around the lake in 1941.

In the airport’s early days in the 1950s, water drained from the wetland toward Lake Spenard on its north side. The trouble came in the 1960s, said Fred Klouda, when the airport installed a perimeter road around its property.

“They simply poured gravel and built a road bed across that wetland, and they didn’t put a culvert in. They essentially created a dam,” Klouda said. “The airport is the cause of it, when they built that road … that blocked the natural flow of water.”

Klouda’s parents moved to a house there in 1974, then he bought it from them and has lived there ever since. But he also spent three decades working at the airport, which included overseeing a big diesel pump that helped drain Meadow Lake, next to DeLong, whenever water levels started to get high.

“I can speak of it because I did it!” Klouda said. “That was one of our regular duties.”

He recalled that after the airport built the Tug Road ringing its property, it added a raised culvert, through which workers ran a hose to drain water into Lake Spenard. Klouda said it wasn’t needed every year, but if DeLong or Meadow lakes started to get too high, they’d pump around the clock for a couple days.

But in 2010, Klouda said, the airport stopped regular pumping. Since then, the water has gradually gotten higher. The last two wet years have pushed things to a new level.

“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” he said.

Walking paths around the lakes are swamped, navigable only in waders. Water backing up onto people’s properties is beginning to spill across the low-lying residential roads.

So far, most of this is mainly a nuisance. No homes have yet been made unlivable. But at a meeting of the Sand Lake Community Council last month, resident Richard Walsh warned that people living closest to the water fear “imminent damage” to their homes come breakup.

“If the water’s not pumped out right now, when we get snow this winter, we’re gonna be in a worse situation this spring,” Walsh said.

He estimates 15 to 20 properties are currently affected. Walsh has contacted local, state and federal officials to try to remedy the situation, but nothing tangible has yet come of it.

He helped get a resolution before the community council calling on the Alaska Department of Transportation to expedite permits that would allow the airport’s interim director, Angie Spear, “to authorize the immediate installation of a temporary culvert and activation of pump to facilitate water movement from the wetlands to Airport Stormwater System.”

The resolution was approved, but since then there’s been no communication from airport managers or elected officials.

“No one here is looking for anything other than (for) the airport to manage the problem and maybe make just an infinitesimal effort to help the neighbors,” Walsh said.

‘A giant list of deferred maintenance’

State transportation officials, who are in charge of the airport, say the problem is not theirs alone to fix.

“It’s really going to take the agencies working together,” said Shannon McCarthy, spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Transportation.

The situation, she said, involves the municipality, state, residents and permitting agencies.

“Water drainage is complicated,” McCarthy said.

Federal and state environmental regulations mean property managers cannot discharge water from wetlands wherever is convenient.

If the airport was to pump out the lakes, McCarthy said, they would need to go through an official permitting process. That is part of what they determined this summer after running the equipment for a few days at the request of neighbors before shutting it down, telling residents they didn’t have the needed permits.

McCarthy said that pumping used to be done under an informal arrangement.

As a method, she added, it is a “visual thing … but it doesn’t always make a difference.” It would take a pump running 24 hours a day for around a month to drop the water level by a foot in DeLong Lake, she said.

“Whether it was done in the past or not, it’s not necessarily a good solution,” McCarthy said.

The department will meet internally with its technical experts, including a hydrologist, to determine drainage patterns. Then it will loop in the municipality as it develops a plan, McCarthy said.

Anchorage Municipal Manager Becky Windt Pearson said the city believes most of the responsibility falls on the airport. She has reached out to state officials and is conducting an internal review of “any municipal interest there that would tie us in.” But, she said, the city’s options are limited.

“The long-term fix is there should be some kind of drainage out of it,” said Assembly member Anna Brawley, who represents the area.

More immediately, Brawley said she thinks the airport needs to step in.

Much of that area is low and has drainage problems, Brawley said. The area’s lakes make for scenic homes and easy recreation. But responsible development requires proper water management, which is part of why residential construction today is more expensive than it was decades ago, she said.

And prior to 1975, when the city and borough of Anchorage merged, many of the borough’s outlying areas built infrastructure hastily, partially or sloppily. Roads were “strip paved,” she said, without culverts or systems enabling natural drainage patterns.

Those original roads are aging, and many have never been improved or updated.

“It’s basically a giant list of deferred maintenance,” Brawley said.

Southcentral Alaska is getting wetter. The warming climate is putting more moisture in the air, part of the reason that Anchorage is seeing snowier winters. If there are issues with water drainage now, Brawley said, they will likely be worse in the decades ahead.