Lawmakers tour homes damaged by 2007 dynamic compaction project 'I am so astonished'

By Jeff Gearino Star-Tribune staff writer Posted: Thursday, January 14, 2010 12:15 am

ROCK SPRINGS -- Sen. Stan Cooper, R-Kemmerer, watches as Ash Street resident Ron Child takes a golf ball and sets it down on his home's hardwood floor. It rolls directly to the northwest corner of the room.
Child sets the ball on the dining room table, kitchen cabinet and coffee table. The ball does the same thing, rolling in the same direction. It's not an illusion.
"The problem is ... how do you fix that?" Child asks about his sloping floor.
Child's home was damaged in 2007 along with a slew of others located in the downtown neighborhood known as "Tree Street" during an ill-fated mine subsidence pilot project.
The project, conducted by the Wyoming Abandoned Mine Lands Division, included a controversial process known as dynamic compaction.
Child and several other Tree Street homeowners have been battling state government over the project -- and the state's first settlement offer to pay for the damage -- for more than three years.
A handful of southwest Wyoming state legislators including Cooper toured more than a dozen homes and a nearby apartment complex Wednesday to get first-hand looks at the damage caused by the project known locally as the "Big Drop."
Lawmakers were stunned by what they saw.
"I am so astonished at the amount of damage in these houses ... it just set me back completely," Cooper said.
"We really need to get this resolved at the state level, but it sounds like we're at an impasse now," he continued. "These folks are between a rock and a hard place and it's just a really unfair situation for them to be in."
The state and most Tree Street residents have yet to reach monetary settlements for the damage and homeowners said Wednesday they continue to be frustrated with the slow pace of the process.
"We've waited so long ... I think some of these houses are now beyond repair," said Donna Maynard. Her Ash Street home sits directly across from the 61-acre project site.
Maynard told lawmakers her house is literally splitting apart at the seams as a result of the project.
Windows sit crooked with broken seals, the skylight and hot tub leak, cracks line many of the walls and ceilings, outside fences lean and a few sinkholes have opened in her yard.
"I'm just generally disgusted," Maynard said. "Nobody wants to live up here anymore. They should just tear down all these houses and just turn it into a park up here."
Affordable housing
Many of the homes in Rock Springs were built around and on top of old coal mines, which were developed in this central Sweetwater County city in the 1860s to supply coal to the Union Pacific Railroad.
The Tree Street neighborhood sits over three different coal mines that lie at two different depths. The mines were all closed and abandoned in the 1920s.
Spurred by a long search for affordable housing, Rock Springs officials selected an undeveloped tract of land in 2007 as the site of a $2.4 million subsidence mitigation project. The tract sits adjacent to the Tree Street neighborhood.
A key component of the project was the use of a pilot technique known as dynamic compaction. The process involved dropping 25- and 35-ton weights on a portion of the tract to collapse the underground mine voids.
For three weeks beginning July 17, 2007, cranes dropped the weights more than 2,200 times before AML officials called off the project.
Homeowners said the shock waves from the ground-pounding reverberated through the neighborhood, cracking foundations and driveways, opening sinkholes in yards and causing cracks to walls, floors and windows among other damage.
The homeowners believe the state's first settlement offers in December 2008 -- which were based on a state-contracted engineer's survey of the damage and repair cost/estimates -- won't adequately compensate for the needed repair work.
Some residents said they are continuing to suffer damage to homes years after the project, including new cracks to ceilings, walls and driveways, gaps in windows, slanting floors and subsidence holes among others.
Wyoming AML Division officials have repeatedly said the state will stand by its initial pledge to repair homes damaged from the project. State officials are expected to base their next settlement offers on the new inspections.
The reinspections come at the request of state lawmakers including Rep. Bernadine Craft, D-Rock Springs, who attempted to allocate funding for the new engineers' assessments during the 2008 Legislature.
Craft and other county representatives sponsored a $2.8 million bill during the session that aimed to provide homeowners with more money for repairs to houses damaged from the dynamic compaction.
The measure allocated an initial $65,000 for the engineers' inspections, but the funding never made it into the final bill. AML officials and residents continued to negotiate last year on a new agreement that would allow the reinspections.
Contact southwest Wyoming bureau reporter Jeff Gearino at 307-875-5359 or gearino@tribcsp.com