Sinkhole claims home
Sydney native coping with loss of Falmouth property
Chris Strickey and his family watched a decade of memories disappear slowly into the ground.
“It’s tough for my family because everybody has just in essence the clothes on their backs,” said Sydney native Strickey, describing the devastation of seeing the two-storey brick-and-wood family home descend into a giant sinkhole on Sunday morning. “There are lots of memories that can’t be replaced and that will be lost.
“Basically, it was just soil that had collapsed,” Strickey said, repeating an assessment from the Municipality of West Hants that attempted to dispel a theory that the gypsum deposits that are prevalent in the area could be responsible for creating the sinkhole.
But two geologists are not convinced that a gypsum sinkhole is not at fault.
“Around Windsor, there is a different kind of rock,” said Ian Spooner, head of the earth and environmental science department at Acadia University in Wolfville. “We call them chemical sediments. Gypsum is one of them but there is limestone and there is salt in the area too.”
Spooner said the sediment is prevalent in the area stretching from Windsor toward Truro along Highway 14.
Bob Ryan, manager of mineral resource evaluation with the provincial Natural Resources Department, said he feels bad for the Strickey family but agrees that a Falmouth subdivision and surrounding terrain would be susceptible to sinkhole activity.
“Certainly, it lies within an area that we have mapped as having high potential for sinkholes,” Ryan said.
He said land does not betray sinkhole tendencies. It’s not spongy and there are no open cracks.
“We often get calls from people that have these opened up in their yard. All we do is provide the geoscience, ‘yes that’s the area they are going to occur in and you are a high risk,’ but after that we would hand them off to a private geo-technical consultant to do an evaluation to see if there is a hazard there and if so what they could do to alleviate it.”
Homebuilders and homeowners are rarely aware of the potential for sinkholes, underground caves that Ryan said may have been forming over hundreds of thousands of years.
“Obviously, as any homeowner can appreciate, you lose sleep about it,” Strickey said of home insurance.
“We all purchase home insurance thinking we are never going to need it. When the adjustor came that morning, he took photos. He was pretty non-committal, understandably. He said this was a unique situation that he had never encountered before,” Strickey said.
Strickey said the wording in his insurance policy covers collapse but he was still waiting for word from the insurance company Tuesday.
Steve Kee, director of digital communications with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said consumers should know that home insurers offer a wide variety of policies.
“Some include various coverages within the contract while other coverage may be required to be purchased as extra if needed,” Kee said in an email.
Spooner said people should be aware of where they are buying or building and there is no certainty that any other homes in Strickey’s neighbourhood would be prone to sinkhole activity.
Ryan and Spooner say it might be a good idea to get an expert to check the landscape before building to identify the potential for underground caverns that can lead to trouble. The province has an interactive map available at https://novascotia.ca/natr/meb/environmental/mineralresources-land-use-atlas.asp that shows the high probability areas, including Falmouth.
Strickey said a house collapse was something he never imagined.
“As you can probably appreciate, there has been a wonderful outpouring of support from friends and family and colleagues,” said Strickey, the admissions director for King’s-Edgehill, a private school in Windsor. “There have been lots of offers from people to put us up because obviously we’re homeless.”
The Strickeys have even had the offer of living in a nearby winterized cottage owned by one of their friends.
“We might go there at least for now until we can get our ducks in a row and get a plan going forward.”
But there is no going back. “The neighbourhood that we lived in is awesome. We loved our neighbours, it was a lovely house. Clearly, we are not going to be there again. That’s emotional.”