Emergency Services Director Bill Gamble is resigning after nearly 27 years of service as a responder in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a vast region including some 25,000 square miles with an often extreme environment of rogue glacial rivers, hurricane force winds, and fire-spreading black spruce.
His career spanned large-scale disasters from the Millers Reach Fire to the recent Sockeye Fire in which up to 1,000 sled dogs had to be evacuated quickly. In 1996, Gamble was a new fire chief during the Millers Reach Fire, likely still the most destructive fire in Alaska as far as buildings destroyed. He served during three other federally-declared Mat-Su disasters, the windstorm in 2003, the floods in 2006 and as the Operations Section Chief when flood waters infiltrated Talkeetna in 2012.