Watauga County: First in Landslides

In 2004 Hurricane Ivan dumped tons of water on Watauga County, causing the soil under the White Laurel subdivision to give way with catastrophic results.

 

As a result of that event and other devastating landslides in western North Carolina -- four people died in a slide on Peeks Creek in Macon County -- the General Assembly appropriated money to map landslide hazards in the western counties. The mapping of Watauga County was completed in 2008. Hardly anyone knows those maps exist, and even fewer prospective homeowners and home builders know how to access and read them before investing in a piece of property.

Watauga is responsible for some 2,257 documented landslides in the Department of Environmental Quality database, far outstripping our nearest competitor for number of earth movements, 919 in Polk County.

We watch the continuing development on steep slopes in Watauga and wait for the next hurricane to follow a period of drought, which is often the one-two punch that produces disaster.

 

Red dots represent the 5,237 recorded “landslide points” where these disasters have occurred since the early 1900s. (Source: DEQ)

Two Deaths From Landslide in Watauga County

Heavenly Mtn development, May 30, 2018
Photo Boone Police Dept.

Thing is, Watauga County was mapped for landslide hazards in 2007, and the area highlighted at that time as most landslide prone was in the Stony Fork precinct which takes in the Heavenly Mountain development. That area experienced devastating landslides in 1940 -- literally, hundreds of them -- and geologic science forecasts that a slope which experienced "debris flow" in the past will experience it again.

The Watauga County landslide hazard maps were presented to the Watauga County Planning Board in January of 2008. The mapping was prompted by the 2004 Hurricane Ivan event which killed five people in Macon County by landslide and devastated the White Laurel development in Boone's ETJ. Because of that, the state legislature said that all 19 mountain counties along the Blue Ridge escarpment needed to know the hazards, so it funded the research. Watauga County was the second county surveyed, and it was very nearly the last. As soon as the Republicans took control in 2011, they cut the funding.

Not that knowing the hazards necessarily saves lives. There's knowing, and then there's really knowing, and the land development community in vacationland never really wanted that information made public. It might have a negative impact on land values.

Those hazard maps are available, incidentally, via the Watauga County Planning and Inspections website.

Resistance Is Futile

Anna Oakes gets on the money trail of Team Templeton in the Watauga Democrat, and Jeff Templeton is forthcoming on why his family has felt it necessary to bludgeon and then buy Boone's town government: They're doing it all to save Watauga County!

"We warned the town council that the over-reaching regulations could have the unintended consequence of encouraging large-scale apartment development outside the town's planning jurisdiction, and now we see that prediction coming true with The Cottages [of Boone]," sez Jeff.

Got that logic? Because Boone now regulates high-density development on steep slopes within its limits, all the obnoxious, destructive, and dangerous development moves out into the county (and Watauga County allows virtually anything). Therefore, O my Brethren, the Town of Boone is totally responsible for that hair-raising development on the ridge known as The Cottages of Boone. And for everything else you see in Watauga County that you don't like.

High Country Press photo

With logic like that, Team Templeton is going to make marvelous overlords! And with the money they've got they're clearly intent on doing whatever it takes to win. Just this week, we've heard of three different violations of the law committed by Team Templeton:

1. Stuffing their flyers into people's mailboxes -- a Federal offense

2. Putting out a flyer with a "Paid for" line listing a local business, which is also illegal under North Carolina law.

3. We are told that Mark Templeton was doing a robocall to cell phone numbers, which is another Federal offense.

The Assault on NC Towns

White Laurel landslide, 2004

The new Republican majority in the NC General Assembly are clearly bent on strangling the life out of the state's towns and cities. The Republicans have passed legislation just this week to make annexations much more difficult for cities. If a town can't grow -- which is clearly the end-goal of the Republicans -- then that town begins to die.

Now comes the Templeton/Soucek assault on Boone's extra-territorial jurisdiction, which will benefit a few individual developers while ringing Boone's steep slopes with a potential for unregulated, wide-open (not to mention dangerous) chaos.

The "local act" scheme for depriving Boone of its ability to manage growth on its surrounding steep slopes applies only to Boone, because -- hey! -- some powerful men desire it. (Apparently, the other municipalities in Dan Soucek's district didn't have either the a. steep-slope regs or b. a sufficiently rich developer to get Mr. Soucek's attention.) Another Republican-sponsored bill (drafted but not yet introduced in the General Assembly) seeks to outlaw extra-territorial jurisdiction generally across the state. More precisely, the draft language of the bill would prevent the state's municipalities from extending their ETJs into areas currently zoned by county government. That's an interesting distinction ... "areas currently zoned by county government." Since Watauga County has no zoning, we assume this particular assault on towns would not actually apply to Boone, but a lot of assumptions about our General Assembly get suddenly bumped askew after midnight. Just sayin'.

The Wake County town of Knightdale, at least, ain't waiting to see. Their town council has already passed a resolution opposing the ETJ draft power-grab. And we're glad to see that they (along with other Wake County municipalities) recognize the economic impact of stripping away ETJ laws: “ETJ is a critical tool to entice developers. Many businesses and individuals have purchased property in reliance on existing ETJ framework .... Removing the option to extend ETJ and the assumed zoning and ordinances may threaten the viability of their investments at a time when the economy in our state is just starting to recover.”

Macon County Looking at Steep-Slope Building Regs

Macon County, NC, where five people were killed in 2004 in a slope failure, is moving forward on adopting steep-slope building regulations. (The infamous Peeks Creek landslide is pictures to the left.)

Haywood, Jackson, and Buncombe counties have already implemented such regs, despite the howls of developers that the world would end.

Not only has the world not ended, but the chair of the Macon County planning commission, who also happens to be a grading contractor, real estate agent, and golf course developer, recently received information that the lack of steep-slope regs in Macon was driving away potential investors.

Lack of. (Read the article linked above for the source of that counter-intuitive conclusion.)

"Some of the naysayers say it's going to stop development,” this gentleman said. “But we can't find any examples of an ordinance that has.”

New Republican Majority in Raleigh: 'Landslides? We Couldn't Care Less!'

In their rush to cut anything and everything that smacks of progressive policies, the Republican NC House budget eliminates the Landslide Mapping Program. Watauga County, which has experienced catastrophic landslides with significant damage and loss to property (but so far no outright deaths, at least not since 1940), was mapped a few years ago, not that any local official will ever do squat with the warnings contained therein, other than throw the info up on the County's website for whoever has the time and patience to search it out.

Other western counties that have been completed are Macon (where five people died in 2004 in the Peeks Creek slide, during the same hurricane event that brought the house pictured here down a hillside in Watauga), Buncombe, and Henderson counties. Some of those counties has enacted county-wide steep-slope building regs to minimize the loss of property and lives.

But this is precisely the sort of "public good" that Republicans hate, because it might interfere with someone's profit margin.

Steep slope engineering, Henderson County, N.C.

Last night's heavy rain brought it down.

Story in Hendersonville Times-News.

Interesting Reversal

Democratic NC House member Gruce Goforth (Buncombe Co.), who is also a land developer who's never exhibited any love for steep-slope building regs., has suddenly reversed himself and says now that he will actually introduce a bill this year that would require mountain counties to comply with minimum steep-slope development rules within two years.

Can you spell "wow"?

This is an election year conversion that might actually mean something for advancing the cause of regulating steep-slope development, since the mountain delegations in the General Assembly have been mainly among the staunchest opposers of any sort of land-use planning.

Why the conversion? Might have something to do with the most recent landslide in Maggie Valley. Might have something to do with the Democratic primary Goforth is facing with Patsy Keever, who does support steep-slope regs and has made that a campaign issue in Buncombe County.

Downslope

In western North Carolina since 1990, six people have died, five have been injured, and 40 homes and buildings have been destroyed in 534 landslides and debris flows on our mountain slopes.

In Watauga County alone, almost 1,000 homes and 300 undeveloped lots are in the path of potential landslides mapped by the North Carolina Geological Survey. Bulldozing new roads on steep slopes is one of the leading causes of slope failure.

Those maps of Watauga County landslide hazards are technically "available" for review, but no county government action has been taken on disclosure of known hazardous slopes to new buyers, for example, or requirements for additional engineering for new construction on slopes deemed unstable or likely to fail. (The Town of Boone did pass new steep slope regs, along with Asheville and the counties of Jackson, Haywood, and Buncombe.)

A bill to regulate steep slope construction in the state's General Assembly was squelched by big developer and real estate lobbies. Some additional mountain counties (like Macon) are moving in the direction of regulating steep-slope construction, and at least one primary campaign in the Democratic Party is making it a political issue in 2010.

Insurgent Patsy Keever, a former Buncombe Co. commissioner, is running a Democratic primary against incumbent Democratic NC House member Bruce Goforth (representing the 115th House district). Goforth is a general contractor.

Keever is well known and well respected in Buncombe. Goforth is a 4-term incumbent, well entrenched. We'll be watching this race on May 4.

Buncombe to Tighten Steep-Slope Regs

Following Jackson County's lead, no less.

Templeton Lawsuit Against Town of Boone Dismissed

It happened back on May 25, but the judge didn't sign his order to make it official until today.

The Jeff Templeton lawsuit against the Town of Boone, challenging the constitutionality of the town's steep-slope development regs, was thrown out by Superior Court Judge Joseph N. Crosswhite (who's a Republican, incidentally) for failing to set out "facts or legal claims which showed any potentially valid basis under state law or the constitution."

This was the second lawsuit filed by Boone attorney Charlie Clement on behalf of Templeton to try to strike down the ordinances. The first attempt was voluntarily withdrawn by Clement in December 2006 just before it was to be heard in court, a move sometimes regarded as an admission of "I have no case."

No State Regs on Steep Slope Building This Year

Because the real estate industry and its allies don't want anything interfering with their God-given rights to sell steep land to people without mentioning that road-building and construction on it may cause it to slide into the nearest valley.

And because the N.C. General Assembly won't mandate disclosure and mitigation laws, neither will individual N.C. counties, even where there is hazardous slope mapping, complete and specific down to individual parcels. Like in Watauga County.

The Asheville Citizen-Times has details on this most recent demise of common sense.

It'll take another round of hurricanes (remember 2005, when part of the White Laurel development came down that hill in Boone and several people died in Macon County?), and maybe not even then, not when there's bunches of money to be made by ignoring the obvious.

Polling on Landslide Hazards

The survey of Watauga County voters about land development issues reported on in yesterday's Watauga Democrat might, in the best of all possible worlds, lead to some new public policy.

Nearly all of the 402 people surveyed -- 95 percent of them -- believe property buyers should be forewarned about landslide hazards.

Duh.

And in this county particularly, there are now very thorough landslide hazard maps available ... though no ordinance requiring the information in them to be shared or acted on. The real estate industry is dead set against it.

'Til the Landslide Brings Us Down

Watauga County gets prominent mention in a lengthy Asheville Citizen-Times report titled "Homes in Harm's Way on Many WNC Slopes." In that currently rarest activity in some of the newspapery world, Citizen-Times reporters actually did some investigation. They "examined hundreds of erosion inspection reports, reviewed a state database of known landslides, examined maps of landslide hazard areas and interviewed environmentalists, builders, real estate brokers, state legislators and government scientists." And found, among other things, that almost 1,000 homes and 300 undeveloped lots are in the path of potential landslides in Watauga County.

Since 1990 six people have died, five have been injured, and 40 homes and buildings have been destroyed in 534 landslides and debris flows across western North Carolina.

The state Geological Survey completed the mapping of hazardous slopes in Watauga, but so far "officials there have made no changes to land development laws in response to the state's mapping" ... no required disclosure to buyers of property that landslide hazards are known to exist and no required engineering to require new building on known hazardous slopes to compensate for the risk.

And nothing's likely to change until Mother Nature once again shows her power. If history is any guide, it'll take another back-to-back hurricane event, like Frances and Ivan of 2004, and some property owners will be given great cause to rue that nothing was done to prevent loss of life and property when something could have and should have been done.

Landslide Hazard Mapping Money Cut in Senate Budget

The state program to map landslide hazard areas in the NC mountains is zeroed out in the proposed NC state Senate budget.

Not soon enough, however, to prevent homeowners in two counties -- Franklin and Watauga -- from knowing whether their new McMansions are planted in previous debris flows or on slopes that have been geologically judged as wanting, that is, highly susceptible to sudden and catastrophic land movement.

The maps of landslide hazards in Franklin and Watauga counties, completed under a state program that the Raleigh Senate now wants to kill dead dead DEAD, was greeted locally with the kind of cheer one might associate with being told you've got an untreatable boil on your gluteus maximus. No one, apparently, wants the information. No one wants to be told that he can't trust the ground on which he wants to pile expensive new infrastructure.

It was, of course, the Democratic grandees of the Senate that xed out the money.

The NC House budget maintains the funds for that mapping program. We'll see how the negotiations between House and Senate budget-writers go.

The unwillingness of NC Senators to ruffle the feathers of real estate and building interests by actually scientifically predicting where people and property could likely come to ruin on our steep mountain slopes is very akin to those now pounding the table for oil drilling off our coasts and in the Arctic Wilderness. "We want candy! We want candy now! No one can tell us that CANDY NOW is not good!"

The next hurricane event in these mountains -- and there will be one -- that buries homes and people's lives will lead to recriminations against government. Elected officials will be called to account for (a) refusing to identify the danger or (b) refusing to act on the information once the danger was mapped.

Our NC senatorial budget dictators obviously plan to out-live the catastrophe, just as the oil-suckers plan to out-live the consequences of their addiction.

The love of money is the root of all evil.