Heavy rains, wind and now flooding and mudslides accompany the disaster declaration made by the Kenai Peninsula Borough Friday. State and borough road crews were dispatched to East End Road in Homer, where water overtook the roadway on Monday.
Borough Emergency Manager Dan Nelson says the declaration reaches back to events that happened a couple weeks ago.
“For this event, we issued it not just for events that happened on the south peninsula and Kachemak Bay area over the Thanksgiving holiday week, but also for the imminent threat of this storm that was coming in. The weather information we received was somewhat uncertain in its specific, but certainly we knew there would be widespread impacts.”
In addition to the flooding on the south peninsula, widespread power outages were reported from Kasilof to Nikiski to Sterling. At one point Monday morning, nearly 4,000 Homer Electric Association customers were without power. Service was mostly restored by Tuesday morning. Start times were also delayed for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District. Nelson says the declaration allowed the borough to start working from its emergency operations plan and get an incident command team together.
“These folks are specially trained in different roles such as planning and logistics that help us coordinate that operation, which is the borough’s main goal; to coordinate not only internally with all of our departments, but externally with our partners such as the Department of Transportation and utility companies.”
The city of Seldovia made its own disaster declaration following the Thanksgiving weekend storm, when gale force winds knocked power and backup power out for more than a day and damaged the city’s small boat harbor and the Jakalof Bay Dock. The borough’s action will trigger a request for a declaration from the state.
