Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 11, 1992 TAG: 9201110112
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
HOMEOWNER SAYS STATE RUINED HOUSE
John Myers charges that when widening of U.S. 221 destabilized his property\ and caused structural damage to his house, the resulting stigma left him in a\ fix despite repair efforts.John Myers had been out of work for nine months before he accepted a job in September as vice president of human resources for a manufacturer in Illinois.
He and his wife put their $140,000 house on Bridlewood Drive in Southwest Roanoke County on the market and moved.
But their house still hasn't been sold. And it can't be, Myers says, because the widening of U.S. 221 destabilized the hill the house sits on and caused structural problems that scare away potential buyers.
His neighbor in the Bridlewood subdivision, David Rogers, is mad at the Department of Transportation, too. "I didn't buy up here to have a view of 221," he says. "I bought up here for the tranquility."
In the past few months, though, many of the trees between Rogers' hilltop house and the highway below have been cut down. And a crack in the ground that Myers' real estate agent calls "a mini-Grand Canyon" has exposed pipes in Rogers' septic system drain field.
The problems began in February when part of Bridlewood Drive near 221 collapsed. The Transportation Department bought some land from Myers, flattened the slope and rebuilt the road.
In June, construction crews widening 221 began to cut into the hill below Myers' and Rogers' houses. The original plan was to leave a steep slope with a ratio of 1.5:1 - a 1-foot increase in elevation for every 1 1/2 feet of distance.
But a landslide occurred, and engineers decided the best solution was to leave a more gentle slope of 3:1 - "flatter than many people's yards in Southwest Roanoke County," the Transportation Department's Salem district administrator, Fred Altizer, said this week.
Given the typical geology in this part of the state, "there was no reason to suspect they were going to have problems" with a 3:1 slope, he said. "We did the most economical thing that provided the quickest solution."
The grading of the slope was nearly complete in October when there was another landslide. It left a jagged gully in the hillside behind the two houses.
The engineers' latest solution is to build a concrete retaining wall at the edge of the highway and fill in dirt behind it, leaving a slope of 4:1.
The landslides will add $700,000, plus the cost of buying more land from Myers and Rogers, to the expected $6.1 million cost of the 221 project. The highway has been four-laned from Virginia 419 to just past Virginia 735 below Bridlewood, a distance of 1.7 miles.
Despite the problems, Altizer said, the project will be finished two months ahead of schedule.
After the bulldozers leave, though, the lawyers will move in.
With each landslide, the state has had to take more of Myers' property. He originally owned 3.5 acres; by the time the hillside is regraded, he will have 1.2 acres left.
The state has had to take more of Rogers' property, too. The construction limit line once was 325 feet from his house. Now it is 62 feet from his house.
Worse, the real estate agent who was trying to sell Myers' house took it off the market after only a month because of structural problems that Myers says were caused, or at least aggravated, by the landslides and blasting for the highway project.
The real estate agent, Karl Ford of Waldrop Realty, said in a letter to the Transportation Department, "Any prudent potential home buyer would have great concerns with the cave-ins and ground faults that have occurred, and whether there will be more in the future. . . . I would not want my children playing in the woods behind this home."
The Transportation Department hired a Frederick, Md., engineering firm to inspect Myers' house, which was built in the late 1970s. It found 40 structural problems, from support poles that have separated from beams in the basement to cracks in the concrete carport.
But it concluded that many of the problems are "typical of defects which can be expected to occur in a house constructed on a steep slope. When faced with a settlement problem in a house such as the Myers', constructed on a hillside, we can reasonably assume that the hill is the cause."
Myers counters that many houses in Bridlewood and elsewhere in the county have been built on hills and don't have damage like his. "The only difference is, the state has destabilized the earth surrounding my house."
Even though the house cannot be sold, the Transportation Department has offered him only $35,770 in compensation, an amount he described as "unfair and ridiculous."
"I am getting a bureaucratic runaround," Myers said.
W.E. Chisom, assistant district right-of-way manager for the department, said the money offered to Myers is for the additional land that is needed to regrade the hill and for the "stigma" the landslides have caused to his property - not for any damage to the house, he said.
Based on the engineering report, "we are not convinced the slides have affected the structural problems in his house," Altizer said.
And any "stigma" should be removed once the hill is regraded, he said.
Myers disagrees, and he wants the Transportation Department to buy his house. "The only reason I'm in this situation is their incompetence," he said. "Why didn't they build the retaining wall the first time? They took the easy way out."
Myers says he is a "David" fighting the "Goliath" of state government. But he has a few rocks in his sling.
He is filing an "inverse condemnation" lawsuit, claiming that the state has, in effect, condemned his property. Even if he wins the lawsuit, though, he might not recoup thousands of dollars in legal and expert-witness fees.
And Myers' boss at Eclipse Combustion in Rockford, Ill., has written a letter to Gov. Douglas Wilder that says, in part, "Virginia, as a site for future expansion, has been at the forefront of my mind - that is, until I became acquainted with John Myers. . . . I must say that I find his situation, as created by the [Department of Transportation] and the government's slow and inadequate response to his problems, to be unconscionable."
Rogers, meanwhile, plans to talk to a lawyer, too. "My goal is to get my property back and have it returned to its original contour."
Despite the hassles, the Transportation Department has learned a valuable lesson from the landslides, Altizer said.
"As a result of this, we're going to be looking closely at all slopes along 221" before the next 2.3-mile stretch of the highway is widened.
That is scheduled to be done in the next six years.