On another island a sleeping couple was killed when their beach home was buried by a slide from the hill above. Some multi-million dollars homes on mainland bluffs in Seattle were lost to land slides too. Expensive real estate ended up in Elliott Bay. The newspaper was full of pictures of slides on our island too. In our neighborhood the one lane road down to the beach--so steep they had posted a sign at the top, now weathered with age, that said "Drive At Your Own Risk"--was washed out by a slide, and like a domino effect that slide triggered more slides that plowed into some houses below. Luckily no one was hurt, but the owners lost electricity for weeks and also lost access to their homes.
Most of the houses on waterfront or bluff property on our island were existing on borrowed time. The large wall map in the county office had most of those areas marked as "unstable". We'd had a geologic study done before we bought the property and the geologist pointed out that our bluff, thankfully, unlike those to the north of us and some to the south, was not prone to wholesale sloughing for two reasons: 1) The property owners before us had left trees and sturdy undergrowth in tact instead of cutting everything down to improve the view, which resulted in the soil being well anchored and able to absorb a good deal of rain water, and 2) Our part of the bluff supported the undergrowth because of its gradual sloping rather than the sheer drop from properties north. It didn't mean we were home free but we were less likely to have a massive slide.
We noticed just about all of our neighbors had better views than did we--that's why they'd bought the property--but they were all adjacent to each other above the same bare, sheer cliff that was slowly sloughing away because there was nothing growing on it to anchor it. That bad "year of the slides" reinforced to us the importance trees play in the ecosystem.
The soil on the bluff north of us had been saturated with rain that winter when about 6" of snow fell on top of it. When it warmed several days later the snow turned into more rain and the weight of the melting snow was all that was needed for the already unstable bluff to give way. Every tree, vine and other undergrowth had been stripped away years earlier, causing continual sloughing until that part of the bluff was now a sheer, steep drop instead of the gradual slope we had. The edge collapsed and slid onto the steep road directly below that led to the houses on the beach; that triggered more slides that washed out the road completely and slid into the backs of several homes.
Aside from the fact that the people on the beach now had no way of reaching their houses, they faced massive expenses getting the road, as well as their houses, repaired. One of the beach residents, an attorney, sent a letter to our association asking if our collective insurance companies would pay for the damage since the real estate that collapsed the road actually belonged to those on the bluff. Understandably, no one was in favor of this since an expensive claim would probably result in the loss of their insurance.
However, the result of not agreeing to do it was a lawsuit filed against the owners of the property that caused the damage. We were thankful we weren't among those sued but as it turned out the lawsuit managed to extract only a nominal amount from the insurance companies. Since that road is private, rather than being owned by the county, the beach residents had to share monumental expenses having the road reinstalled and a retaining wall erected that would hopefully mitigate future slides.
Needless to say, feeling between the residents of the beach and the bluff has not been warm and fuzzy since!
No comments:
Post a Comment