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

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

His property is in a low-lying, swampy part of West Anchorage. Several dozen homes crowd against Lake DeLong, and others are nestled in adjacent wetlands before reaching the edge of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport to the north.

Recently the water has risen. The last two years have been unusually wet. Water collects in places it has never been before, trapped because the liquid has nowhere to go.

Residents say the situation could get worse if there were another winter of heavy snowfall. And they say the fault lies not only with nature, but also with the airport. They mark the end of a decade informal arrangement in which maintenance workers occasionally operated a pump to remove water from lakes when they were overly swollen.

But the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, which oversees the airport, says it’s not up to it alone to solve the problem. Even if that were the case, the agency says, moving water around wetlands requires all sorts of permits.

Local officials say it’s part of a larger story about how poorly built infrastructure from Anchorage’s boom years is aging in a way that proves difficult and expensive to repair.

But Fetter and some of his neighbors are already seeing water seeping into their yards, outbuildings and homes.

“We removed all the insulation from our crawl space. We dug trenches,” Fetter said. He also gave up part of his land to the water, moving his fence back so his dog would stop. He and his wife removed their back deck and spread 14 tons of gravel this summer in an attempt to build the yard. After discovering that his crawl space contained water “up to his calves,” he installed three sump pumps.

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

But his real worry is what might happen if they break 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 got its name from a janitor, Joseph S. DeLong, who looked after a local school when he obtained an 80-acre property around the lake in 1941.

In the airport’s early days in the 1950s, water flowed from the wetland into Lake Spenard on the north side. The problems arose in the 1960s, Fred Klouda said, when the airport installed a perimeter road around his property.

“They just poured gravel and built a roadbed through this wetland, and they didn’t put in a culvert. They basically created a dam,” Klouda said. “The airport caused it, when they built this road… which blocked the natural flow of water.”

Klouda’s parents moved 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, including overseeing a large diesel pump that helped drain Meadow Lake, next to DeLong, whenever water levels began to rise.

“I can talk about it because I did it!” Klouda said. “It was one of our regular tasks.”

He recalled that after the airport built the Tug Road surrounding his property, it added a raised culvert, through which workers ran a pipe to release water into Lake Spenard. Klouda said it’s not necessary every year, but if DeLong or Meadow Lakes start to get too high, they will pump 24 hours a day for a few days.

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

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

The walking trails around the lakes are flooded and navigable only by waders. Water that accumulates on people’s properties begins to flow onto low-lying residential roads.

So far, most of these problems are a nuisance. No house has yet become uninhabitable. But at a Sand Lake Community Council meeting last month, resident Richard Walsh warned that those living closest to the water feared “imminent damage” to their homes in the event of a breakup.

“If the water is not pumped out now, when we get snow this winter, we will 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 about.

He helped obtain a resolution before the community council asked the Alaska Department of Transportation to expedite permits that would allow Acting Airport Director Angie Spear to “authorize the immediate installation of a temporary culvert and activation of a pump to facilitate the movement of water from wetlands to the airport stormwater system. .”

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

“Nobody here is looking for anything other than (that) the airport handles the problem and maybe just makes 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.

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

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

“Water drainage is complicated,” McCarthy said.

Federal and state environmental regulations mean property managers can’t release water from wetlands where it’s convenient for them.

If the airport were to pump the lakes, McCarthy said, it would have to go through a formal 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 necessary permit.

McCarthy said pumping used to be done as an informal agreement.

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 by a foot in DeLong Lake, she said.

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

The ministry will meet internally with its technical experts, including a hydrologist, to determine drainage patterns. Then it will roll out through the municipality as it develops a plan, McCarthy said.

Anchorage City Manager Becky Windt Pearson said the city believes most of the responsibility lies with the airport. She has contacted state officials and is currently conducting an internal review of “any municipal interests that may bind us.” But, she said, the city’s options are limited.

“The long-term solution is there should be some sort of drainage,” one Assembly member said. Anna Brawley, who represents the region.

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

Much of that area is low-lying and has drainage issues, Brawley said. The area’s lakes make for picturesque homes and easy recreation. But responsible development requires good water management, which is part of the reason residential construction is more expensive today than it was decades ago, she said.

And before 1975, when the city and borough of Anchorage merged, many outlying areas of the borough built their infrastructure hastily, partially, or carelessly. The roads were “strip paved,” she explained, with no culverts or systems for natural drainage.

These 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 becoming wetter. Global warming is causing more humidity in the air, which is part of the reason Anchorage is seeing snowier winters. If there are water drainage problems today, Brawley said, they will likely get worse in the decades to come.

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