Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305230010
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Plenty of bedrooms. Thick trees to climb. A big yard, bordered on one side by the gurgling water of Garnand Branch.
In July 1991, newly divorced and with custody of two small children, Ponting used her share of the money from the sale of the family's home to buy the dream on Rose Avenue.
She wanted to fix up the house a bit and sell it for a profit to buy even a better home, and she set to patching and painting.
The taxes, homeowner's insurance and flood insurance fees dwarfed her monthly mortgage payments, but Ponting figured she could handle it.
She was running a cleaning business, coordinating as many as seven workers at a time.
Things were looking up for Trish Ponting.
"Until May 21, 4:09 p.m.," she says. "Once you've been in a flood, you never forget when it came."
The stream roared over its banks, lapped at the house, climbed over the front porch and into the first floor of the house. The hardwood floor was rolling beneath her feet when Ponting finally abandoned ship, scrambling with her son and her daughter uphill to safety.
She watched her vacuum cleaners and her buffers and her cleaning supplies and chemicals ripped from the basement and swept downstream.
She soon found out the value of all those insurance premiums.
"My insurance would pay to store our furniture, or to bury us, but not to put us up someplace," she said.
David Bowers, then the mayor-elect, helped her find a place to stay for a month.
She hired a lawyer, had the home's structural damage fixed and moved back in.
But the Small Business Administration wouldn't help re-establish her break-even cleaning business; she faltered, and then abandoned her mortgage payments.
In March, she was flooded again - water and gravel firing from a hole in the foundation as if shot by a cannon - and the house seemed to sag. The second flood destroyed the $5,000 worth of repairs done less than a year before.
Trish Ponting moved out and got an apartment a mile away.
She checked daily for mail at the house on Rose Avenue and watched the cracks in the foundation grow wider.
The place was burglarized, her TV and many of her keepsakes stolen.
Her mortgage lender soon will start foreclosure proceedings - Ponting figures to lose her $10,000 down payment - and last week she found the deadbolt broken out and a padlock put on her door.
Her attorney won't return her repeated phone calls.
The mortgage lender promised to send her via overnight mail a key to the padlock - but didn't.
The grass outside 1315 Rose Ave. has grown knee-high.
Trish Ponting is learning how to do framing work. It's therapeutic, she says, to swing a hammer with all her strength, crashing down on a piece of wood.
by CNB