An Oakland neighborhood is fighting with the city over who will pay to fix a once innovative, but now failing drainage system built to protect nearly two dozen hillside homes from the risk of landslides.
One of the homeowners, Kathy Mulvany, bought her home in the Trestle Glen neighborhood 17 years ago.
“When I first bought the house,” she said, “I bought it as a single professional. I loved the house, fell in love with it immediately.”
Back then, she says, she had no idea of her neighborhood’s landslide history.
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For the first dozen years, her love for her Barrows Road home never wavered. But then came signs of trouble.
Her garage started flooding regularly, for no obvious reason, even in the summer.
Then her backyard patio began to buckle. Concerned, she brought in an expert, and eventually joined with some of her neighbors to demand Oakland officials reveal what they knew about the heavily saturated hillside around their homes.
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Turns out, contractors blocked an underground hillside stream when they built her neighborhood, causing water to collect on the hill.
“We were concerned about the stability of this hillside and our homes,” Mulvany said about the letter. But Oakland Public Works officials referred her to the city attorney, saying the hillside on private land was the homeowners’ responsibility.
But Mulvany also learned that the city had constructed an elaborate system of pipes to drain the hillside back in 1942, only to allow it to languish over the ensuing decades.
While several drainage pipes were routed to a brick-lined cistern, one expert says most no longer function because they are clogged with debris.
“The water is built up – water is not your friend when it builds up,” said Alan Kropp, a geotechnical engineer hired by Mulvany’s lawyer to evaluate the issue. Recent tests confirm, he says, several drain lines are either clogged with dirt or significantly deteriorated.
“If the water is not drawn out and it's weak because it kind of progressively weakens it further -- that's a problem,” Kropp said.
“I am very concerned that this could lead to another slide,” Mulvany stressed, adding that after she and her neighbors were turned away by the city, she ended up suing. She has also sued her neighbors, whose former owners once chipped in to pay for half the now dilapidated system.
The city attorney declined to comment on the pending case. Meanwhile, a retired judge is now acting as a mediator to oversee fact-finding in the dispute.
As long as the system is clogged, Kropp says, there is a small risk of another landslide. Although the saturated hillside isn’t moving fast at the moment, it could pose a serious risk of sliding after a quake, Kropp says.
He said there is a risk it could start moving more quickly if nothing is done. He says even at its current slow pace, it could prove costly.
“That slow, steady damage could still be pretty significant for houses, for sidewalks and streets and other things,” he said. For now, as the case moves through court, Mulvany and her neighbors are left hoping that a solution will be in place in time to avoid more damage.
