Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Wednesday, February 12, 2025 66° Today's Paper


Hawaii News

Creeping landslide puts N.Y. house on precipice

KEENE VALLEY, N.Y. » On May 6, the iris garden alongside Jim and Charity Marlatts’ house on a mountain two hours north of Albany was cleaved by a small crack only two inches wide. It was the start of a natural catastrophe, one that is still unfolding at an excruciatingly slow pace.

The Marlatts’ treasured glass-and-wood retirement home is now on the scarp — the geologic term for the edge above — of the largest landslide in New York State history. About 82 acres of earth is slipping downhill and taking trees, rocks and houses with it.

But unlike the landslides that occur in a rush as debris breaks free, usually after a torrential rain or earthquake, this one is occurring incrementally, moving anywhere from two inches to two feet per day. "It is like Chinese water torture," Charity Marlatt said, "drip by drip."

Within weeks, the crack in the garden extended nearly a mile and as the land on the downhill slope began sliding away toward the valley, it created a step that is now a 20-foot vertical drop. Half of the flowers and half of the property beneath the Marlatts’ house went with the sliding mass. Before long, their master bedroom and dining room were hanging over the cliff’s edge.

The situation is so precarious that the Marlatts have hired house movers to drag their home from the precipice and eventually situate it 100 feet away — a project estimated to cost $150,000. And insurance covers none of it. Jim Marlatt said representatives of New York Central Mutual, their carrier, called it "unfortunate" but said the company did not compensate expenses from damage caused by landslides. They would not send an assessor out to take a look, he said. Other home owners — a total of six have been affected so far — have been similarly denied. The American Insurance Association says that the risk of landslide is so difficult to predict that routine policies omit damage from such events. Landslides almost always require separate coverage.

Ask and geologists will say that landslides are much more common than people realize. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that they occur in every state and each year kill on average 25 people nationally, while wreaking $1 billion to $2 billion in damage. Yet they are perhaps the least studied of the natural disasters and very difficult to anticipate, said Francis Ashland, a research geologist with the survey.

Slow-moving landslides are also not uncommon, particularly out west. For example, geologists have been following a very slow slide in North Salt Lake City that has been on the move since 1998.

New York State is not generally perceived as landslide territory, but in mountainous areas to the north there are quite a few. The last really large one occurred in Tully Valley, just South of Syracuse, in 1993, during which several homes and dozens of acres of cropland were ruined. Albany and Schenectady have also been the sites of smaller but very costly slides.

The high peaks around Keene and the Finger Lake regions in upstate New York have been found to be particularly susceptible to the slides because of loose soil deposited on bedrock and formed by glacial lake sediment thousands of years ago, said Andrew Kozlowski, the associate state geologist with the New York State Museum and director of its geological mapping program.

For geologists, figuring out the timing and location of the slides is the real challenge. This has been an active year for slides from Burlington, Vt., to Pittsburgh, said Ashland, who is studying their underlying cause and rate of occurrence. Western Pennsylvania currently has the highest landslide hazard in the country.

"In general, the likelihood of landslide occurrence increases during wet cycles in which there are more wet years than dry years and periods of successive wet years," he said.

Abnormally heavy snows and spring rains triggered the Keene Valley slide, according to Kozlowski, who is the lead scientist here. To his trained eye, it is clear that there were landslides on this very slope before, but hundreds of years ago.

This landslide — about a mile wide — was probably triggered, he said, as groundwater built up and eventually loosened soil as deep as 80 feet. Once surface cracking began, it allowed more water in, and now the whole side of the hill, 60 to 80 feet down, is on the move. While the actual motion is not detectable to human feet, residents and scientists alike are wary of moving about the slide because occasionally a tree is felled or a boulder is loosened and sent rushing down the slope.

The toe of this landslide, or the bottom, is flowing very slowly out on a field in the valley, where it has already cracked trees and an electric pole and is threatening a farmhouse about 50 yards away across a dirt road that Kozlowski predicts will be damaged within the year.

He will not venture a guess as to when the flow might cease. "It could be three months or three years or longer, depending on rainfall," he said.

It is theoretically possible to mitigate a slow slide through extensive drainage and by buttressing the toe, but such work is very expensive and often does not pass a cost benefit analysis, Ashland said. He added this would certainly be the case in Keene Valley, which is a very large slide.

Which means that homeowners like the Marlatts have very little choice but to hope for fine, dry weather. "We just pray every day for sunshine," Charity Marlatt said. As she spoke, the sky out of the windows of the guest house darkened with a storm.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

Comments are closed.