InfrastructureCalifornia community sinking into the ground, and engineers are baffled

Homes sink into the ground and no one knows why // Source: jschina.com.cn

Several homeowners in the community of Lake County, California are faced with a problem:  their houses are sinking into the ground and they do not know why.

Some homeowners have begun to talk about the area being haunted, and even asked the local Native American tribe whether the hilltop was an ancient burial ground.

“Someone said it must be hexed,” Blanka Doren, who poured her life savings into the house she bought in 1999 so she could live on the rental income, told Fox News. Fox News reportsthat eight homes have been abandoned, and ten more are under notice of imminent evacuation. Making things worse is the uncertainty about the sinkholes, which can move many feet in one day and less than a fraction of an inch the next.

If the county cannot get the water and sewer service stabilized, all thirty houses within the community will be abandoned. Homeowners also face financial problems, because insurers say the kind of problems afflicting the area are not covered. Homes in the area are valued between $200,000 and $250,000.

The situation has been deteriorating steadily, and now mail delivery has been cancelled in the area, and city and county crews have been forced to change the subdivision’s sewage line to an overland pipe as a result of manhole collapses. 

City officials think that the problem is the result of water reaching the surface, but engineers do not know how the water reached the top of the hill in a county faced with groundwater shortages.

“That’s the big question,” Scott De Leon, county public works director told Fox News. “We have a dormant volcano, and I’m certain a lot of things that happen here (in Lake County) are a result of that, but we don’t know about this.”

Last week the state sent a water resources engineer and a geologist to investigate the problem. The Lake County Board of Supervisorshas asked Governor Jerry Brown to declare the situation an emergency so they can get funding necessary to do more work to find the source of the problem.

According to the California Emergency Management Agency, Brown is still assessing the situation.

Consultant Tom Ruppenthal said that two cracks in the county sewer system are not significant enough to be the cause of the water flowing underground, but it could have led the water to shift its course.

“It’s very common for groundwater to shift its course,” Ruppenthal of Utility Services Associatesin Seattle said. “I think the groundwater has shifted.”