Damaged houses focus of legal battle
Heartsick B.C. homeowners push for compensation over landslides
Lacey LaRochelle had a minor triumph last week: she made it through a conversation about her ruined house without breaking down in tears.
The occasion was a council meeting in her hometown, where the damage to her home was on the agenda once again, nearly five years after a torrent of water and debris came rushing down the slope behind it.
She and younger brother Cory were told they’d never be able to live in the house again, and they’ve been fighting since to get compensation from the municipality.
“I would just like them to make it right. I’m just tired of being made to feel like this is my fault and I’m doing something wrong,” LaRochelle said.
“I just wish they could be in my shoes for a day, or think of what if it was their daughter or their granddaughter. How would they handle it then?”
LaRochelle and her next-door neighbour, Elaine Meiklem, are suing the District of Lillooet, B.C., alleging the 2011 landslides that left their lives in shambles were caused by water flowing off district land.
They claim the municipality’s illegal diversion earlier that year of a creek above their properties caused an inundation of water into the ground that was at least partly responsible for the slope’s failure.
The LaRochelles lost more than just a place to live.
The house had belonged to their mother, who died of an aneurysm in 2005 when Lacey was 19 and Cory was 13. Their extended family campaigned to get the property into their names so they could continue to live there together.
“It’s all we had. We fought so hard to keep it, just to have it taken away,” Lacey said, sobbing.
The loss of Meiklem’s house hit nearly as hard.
She had purchased the converted dairy barn just four years earlier, and her husband’s ashes were buried beneath a tree in the meticulously maintained gardens.
“That was the first house I bought on my own after my husband died,” she said. “It’s a very emotional place for me.”
The two neighbours were ordered to evacuate on Dec. 1, 2011, but LaRochelle remembers the water started trickling down the slope a couple of months before a state of emergency was declared.
By late November, it had turned into a gushing waterfall, pushing debris against their back door.
“My brother had phoned me at work,” she said. “He woke up and he stepped in water when he got out of bed. He was frantically trying to change the course of the water so it wouldn’t go in the house. I was just worried about him all the time, to be at home by himself and trying to do this.”
Longtime residents can’t remember a landslide like this one.
“There never was a flood problem,” said George Vanderwolf, who has lived in Lillooet for more than 60 years. “This was a one-off thing.” LaRochelle and Meiklem were initially told they’d be back in their homes in time for Christmas. But another big slope failure on New Year’s Eve sealed the deal, and the district held a meeting to inform the homeowners that their houses would be forever uninhabitable.
LaRochelle’s aunt Holly Polischuk has been the siblings’ advocate since their mother died, and she remembers that meeting well.
“It was terrible. Lacey and Cory were sobbing. It was horrible for me and my parents,” Polischuk said.
Their homeowners’ insurance didn’t cover the damage as an “act of God,” but Lillooet’s then-mayor, Ted Anchor, felt the district should be held accountable.
“Are they liable? In my opinion, yes — the diversion was done by the district,” he said recently.
“I think the district should have claimed liability and put these people at rest and paid them out for their homes.”
He had one councillor, Kevin Taylor, on his side, but he said the remaining three councillors and the chief administrative officer were opposed.
Just two months after they were elected, Anchor and Taylor resigned, and the former mayor said that liability for the landslides was a major factor in that.
Current Mayor Marg Lampman and CAO Michael Roy said they couldn’t comment on the case while it’s before the courts, but in its response to the lawsuit, the district denies that the water flowed from municipally-owned lands and claims that any damage was caused by LaRochelle and Meiklem’s failure to reduce the risk of slides around their property.
The district’s response acknowledges that there was a new diversion to Town Creek in 2011, but denies it was a contributing factor.
The increased water flow that fall and winter, according to the district, was largely a result of a 2009 wildfire that destroyed 3,700 hectares of nearby forest.
The response was filed in B.C. Supreme Court in March 2013, just two days before the district received a sternly-worded letter from the Ministry of Forests. It seems the district hadn’t gotten the necessary provincial authorization under the Water Act to divert the creek, and the ministry was ordering it to fill in the diversion ditch.
None of the allegations in Meiklem and LaRochelle’s lawsuit have been proven in court.
Their lawyer, John Hogg, said that both sides are currently hiring experts to look into what exactly caused the landslides and to assess the value of the properties.
He added that the district will be sending contractors to the two homes to determine if they can be moved and rebuilt.
In the meantime, Meiklem has left Lillooet to live in the Slocan Valley. She said the memories were too painful to stay, but she’s still making mortgage payments on the house she thought she’d live in for the rest of her life.
LaRochelle and her brother are still in town, living separately and paying rent. LaRochelle hadn’t seen her house in years before this month; she said she can’t even drive past the place without breaking into tears.
She made a short visit last week, after receiving a letter from the district ordering her to clean up the yard. The property is overgrown with burdocks and brambles, and is now considered a fire hazard.
But both she and Meiklem, along with their lawyer, said they’d never realized they were allowed back on the property. The evacuation order wasn’t rescinded until a year after it was issued, and they say they didn’t receive any direct notification.
CAO Michael Roy said he couldn’t be sure how the families were notified, only that it would have been public.
For LaRochelle, that notification may have been limited to a piece of paper stapled to the gate at the end of her driveway.
On one side, it warns, “DO NOT OCCUPY,” and on the other, it confirms that the evacuation order has been lifted.
Polischuk said she wishes they’d known much sooner.
“We could have been maintaining the property, we could have gone back into the house and gotten their stuff ... bins from my sister that passed away.”
The district has given the two families until September to clean up, but LaRochelle believes it should be up to the municipality to pay for the work, and she has the support of two councillors.
Another council meeting to discuss the matter is being held Monday night, but the mayor has said she would prefer if community members volunteered to help their neighbours.
Friends and neighbours have pitched in from the beginning, LaRochelle said. They’ve volunteered to document the damage, performed amateur surveys of the creek diversion and spoken out at council meetings. But what she really wants is for council to take action.
“They keep saying that they don’t want to look back into the past, that they’re always moving forward. But how am I supposed to move forward? I make $1,700 a month and I’m probably close to $50,000 in legal fees (split with Meiklem) now,” she said.
I just wish they could be in my shoes for a day, or think of what if it was their daughter or their granddaughter.