When Mayor Stan Selmer called the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ask for help, he was told he would have to wait until the city actually got flooded before the federal agencies could intervene. "Well, we weren't going to just sit there and let the river flood us," says Selmer. The city decided to bulldoze a channel through a dry riverbed that would divert floodwaters into a nearby inlet. Selmer notified the Environmental Protection Agency, the corps and the Alaska departments of Environmental Conservation, Fish and Game and Natural Resources, telling them what the city was up to. He got no notice to cease and desist from any of the agencies.
However, in December, Selmer received a letter from EPA Field
Operations Chief C.D. Robinson saying that the city had violated
the Clean Water Act. According to the
Skagway News,
Robinson wrote that the city was mistaken in trying to protect itself
without the participation of the Corps of Engineers and that even in
an emergency the city should make reasonable efforts "to receive
comment from interested federal, state and local agencies."
"If I had time to do all that," says Selmer, "we'd all be underwater before anybody figured out we were in an emergency situation." Ironically, he notes, it is partly the EPA's fault that Skagway is in danger of flooding: In 1986 the EPA ordered a contractor to remove dikes that protected his property. In 1990, the river overflowed in the same spot where the dikes had been. Selmer is refusing to undo any of the work and plans to try to get the EPA to let him do more work to protect the city. "The amazing thing," he says, "is that the clean water the EPA is trying to protect is the same water that would wind up drowning the people in our community."
