Cement blocks line the end of North Oak Avenue and behind them is a fence warning residents to stay away from the rocky, weeded cliff on the other side.
But a few times a month, North Oak resident Chris Linden walks beyond the gate and looks down at the mess below.
It has become a ritual in the 16 months since the mudslide at the property threatened to dump the vacant house at 161 North Oak Ave. down the steep slope onto the condos below.
Last Wednesday Linden called 911 when he noticed the dirt between large boulders had eroded in the last week’s rain and the rocks appeared to be shifting away from the cliff.
“There’s a 2‑inch gap there now,” Linden said Wednesday.
The city’s fire department was dispatched to the scene, and determined the boulders weren’t a public safety issue. After speaking to the city’s engineering department, Fire Marshal James Tortora left the scene.
“It’s not city property,” Tortora said. “It would be up to the property owner of that area to maintain it.”
Familiar Refrain
The neighbors at the top — and the bottom — of the hill continue to be concerned with the clean up of the site. And, they worry that the earth isn’t done shifting.
Without a homeowner to blame, they’ve been calling the city and sending e‑mails to Mayor Mark Lauretti, expressing those concerns.
And the city’s response continues to be the same: Absent an immediate public safety issue, the problem is no longer the city’s to deal with.
“Everybody’s looking at the city like the city’s the culprit,” Lauretti said Thursday morning. “But the city’s not responsible.”
Background
The problems started in December 2009, when a burst water pipe at 161 North Oak Ave. washed the ground out from beneath the home.
The burst pipe caused a mudslide down the steep embankment, clearing trees from the hill and pouring mud and debris into a brook and the property of the Riverview Condominiums below.
The city had to get involved because of an unclear situation with the homeowners. They were going through foreclosure on the home, but still technically owned the property.
Shelton paid to have the home demolished after the mudslide because it posed a public safety danger: At any moment it could have fallen off the cliff onto the condos below.
Then in August, the city paid $19,500 to remove debris from the demolition — after residents on North Oak Avenue complained about rodents gathering there.
Shelton fought to have their homeowner’s insurance pay back the demolition repairs, but without any success, Lauretti said.
“It’s not going to happen,” Lauretti said.
Nobody’s Problem
The landslide happened at the intersection of three lots of private and city-owned land. The past year and a half has been filled with questions about who is responsible to clean up the problem.
If the mudslide happened at 161 North Oak, should the insurance for that property clean up trees that fell onto condo-owned property?
If water continues to pour onto the cliff from a drainage pipe from a state road, who is responsible for the effects of that?
In most cases, the answer is that the responsibility has flowed downhill — where the Riverview Condominiums sit.
The condo board paid $6,500 to remove large trees that fell in December. Their insurance wouldn’t pay them back, condo board president Jim Sidoruk told the Valley Indy last summer.
“There is no money (in the property owners’ names). We have no one to go after to recoup the loss,” Sidoruk said at the time.
In the past few weeks, volunteers on the condo board started cutting up the remaining trees to have them removed.
And the condo owners have been waiting to hear whether the city or the state owns a drainage pipe that keeps pouring water down the hill.
Linden said water from the pipe has eroded at least 6 inches from the embankment in the past few months.
Lauretti Thursday said the pipe starts on a state road, but the city plans to divert the water somewhere else. The work was scheduled to start last week, he said.
He said the drainage wasn’t causing that much of an issue, though.
“The bigger problem was created a year ago, when that pipe burst,” Lauretti said.
