When Ray Hobby heard there had been a landslide at his friend’s house in Maggie Valley two winters ago, he dashed out of work at the Maggie Valley Country Club and headed across town.

There were mobs of people already there, mostly rescue workers swarming Edward Jones’ property in an attempt to find Jones’ wife, Patricia, who was buried in the landslide and would later be found dead. But Hobby gravitated in a different direction, to the source of the landslide. A state road on the hill 20 feet above his friend’s home had slid away, crashing down the near vertical slope, simultaneously shoving the house off its foundation and burying it.

The heap of mud at the foot of the collapsed embankment seemed saturated with water, but the cross-section of soil all around the landslide seemed dry. Protruding from the exposed landslide were two ends of a broken waterline that once ran beneath the road.

The ends of those water pipes need to be saved, Hobby thought. Workers with the Maggie Valley Sanitary District, a private water entity that owned the lines, were already at the property, too, and agreed to cut off the pipe stubs sticking out of the bank. Not knowing what else to do with them, they were handed to the Maggie Valley Police Department to store temporarily.

Now, 18 months and reams of court filings later, those two sections of pipe are still sitting in the police station. They aren’t evidence in the typical sense of the word: “We are just holding it as a mutual party,” said Police Chief Scott Sutton.

Sutton might be holding those pipes a while longer, judging from the weighty lawsuit filed against the Maggie Valley Sanitary District by Jones. Jones, 74, claims the water entity is responsible for his wife’s death and the loss of his home.

“There had to be a huge amount of water added to the soil to make this happen,” said Mark Melrose, a Sylva-based attorney representing Jones. “Unless you add water, this type of soil is not going to move.”

Melrose said it wasn’t rain and it wasn’t an underground spring, leaving a broken waterline as the only explanation for the soil saturation that triggered the landslide.

In court filings, however, the Maggie Valley Sanitary District claims the landslide wasn’t their fault, but was due to natural causes.

“The landslide which caused injury to plaintiffs was an Act of God which occurred only by the violence of nature without the interference of any human. It was a natural event resulting from physical causes alone,” an attorney for the water company stated in a court filing disputing Jones’ claim.

The water entity adds, however, that land disturbance by the Jones could have been a contributing factor in the landslide.

“The (Jones) cut, removed or destroyed all or substantial amounts of the vegetation on the hillside on their property in the 12 to 24 months prior to the landslide,” according to a rebuttal filed by the water company.

The Jones also had built a 6-foot retaining wall against the bank behind their home and possibly compromised the stability of the bank, rebuttals stated.

Hindsight

There are two clues that could have alerted either the Maggie Valley Sanitary District or the DOT to pending disaster at least a month prior to the incident, according to Melrose. Jones saw water coming off the hill above his house and also noticed discoloration in his tap water.

Jones thought the water on the hillside was runoff from the road up above. So he called the DOT maintenance department and complained.

The maintenance department sent someone out to inspect it. But the berms and ditches that keep run-off from spilling over the edge of the road and down the hill onto Jones’ property were in good shape, the worker discovered.

Meanwhile, Jones says that he complained to the Sanitary District about mud in his water filter. According to Jones, Sanitary District Manager Neil Carpenter said the lines needed to be blown out. But the discoloration was not solved, and Jones brought his filter into the water district office, Melrose said. According to Jones, Carpenter said he would talk to the workers about blowing the lines again, that perhaps it wasn’t done properly.

In hindsight, blowing the lines wouldn’t have fixed the problem, said Melrose. Melrose thinks the discoloration was a result of soil particles entering the waterline through a fracture in the pipe above Jones’ house. Melrose claims the Sanitary District didn’t properly investigate the complaint.

“Neil Carpenter said if he had gone out there and seen water behind his house and known what he knew about discoloration, he would have been concerned,” Melrose recounted of a deposition taken from Carpenter.

But the sanitary district questions whether there was indeed moisture coming off the hillside prior to the slide.

“(The Jones) failed to warn, notify or otherwise put on notice of any water, excess water or any leaks that may or may not have existed prior to the landslide,” the attorney representing the Sanitary District stated in court filings.

The Charlotte-based attorney representing the Sanitary District did not return phone calls requesting comment.

Two and two

Melrose also blames the DOT for failing to connect the dots that could have saved Patricia Jones’ life. When the DOT worker checked the ditches and berms and decided the excess water wasn’t coming off the road, they should have gone a step further, Melrose said.

“DOT knew there was a water line under the road and they knew the homeowner was reporting a lot of water below that and they knew it wasn’t them. They had the duty to report that to the Sanitary District. They should of said, ‘Hey, maybe we need to figure this out guys,’” Jones said. “That’s what we call negligence. You had a duty to be concerned and you weren’t. That’s a classic case of negligence.”

Jones said DOT should keep track of where water lines are in their right of way, especially as this one had been repaired in the past.

“I think they should have an adequate institutional memory,” Melrose said of the DOT. “If they don’t do their job, people die. They have an obligation to know these things.”

DOT never called Jones back either to tell him they weren’t the cause of the water, so Jones thought maybe they were just being slow to fix it, Melrose said.

The state Attorney General’s office is defending the N.C. DOT in the case, but would not comment.

“Our policy is not to comment when a case is in litigation,” said William McKinney, spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office.

In court filings, the DOT claims that the Jones failed to monitor the slope behind his house “for any indications of failure of slope or any significant discharges of water so that remedial action could be taken, and in otherwise failing to exercise due care.”

DOT also cites the removal of vegetation on the bank and installation of a retaining wall that “truncated the slope.”

DOT also assigned blame to the Maggie Valley Sanitary District, but “denied that any employees or agents of (the DOT) were negligent,” according to court filings. The cap on a wrongful death suit against a state agency is capped at $500,000.

Going back

The waterline was built in the 1970s by a private company, Maggie Valley Leisure Estates, owned by now Congressman Charles Taylor, R-Brevard. Within a couple of years, Taylor wanted the Maggie Valley Sanitary District to take over the water line. The water entity would get new customers and Taylor would rid himself of the headache of operating a water system.

In their rebuttal to the lawsuit, Maggie Valley Sanitary District has been quick to point out they were not the ones that designed and built the original line.

In 1986, 10 years after the sanitary district took over responsibility for the line, it broke on the hillside above where Jones would later build his house. Melrose took a deposition from a maintenance worker with the Maggie Valley Sanitary District who recalled the repair of nearly 20 years ago.

“He described the way they did the repair and what we contend is that that repair was performed negligibly,” Melrose said.

The water line was under the roadbed and required digging up the road to make repairs. After excavating the line and some of the soil underneath it, workers cut away the section of line that was leaking, placed a sleeve over the two ends to reconnect the pipe and put the soil back over the line. Melrose said they skipped the last step, which should have been compacting the soil.

“The theory I believe we can prove is that when they did this repair they didn’t compact the soil, so over time it slowly settled, which caused a deflection in the pipe,” Melrose said.

In a wrongful death suit, the jury decides the amount.

“The jury is allowed to consider the type of person she was, her relationship with her husband and her children and determine the value of the life that was lost as best they can assign a dollar value to the life of this,” Melrose said. Patricia Jones was 65 when she was killed.

Where’s the water?

Everyone from rescue workers to professional engineers who showed up at Jones’ house the day of the slide have described the soil at the base of the slide as supersaturated, according to Melrose. Melrose claims it wasn’t an underground spring and it wasn’t rainfall, leaving the waterline as the only answer.

Melrose cited observations made by Jody Kuhne, a geologist and landslide expert with the N.C. Department of Transportation, and Rick Wooten, a geologist and landslide expert with the N.C. Geological Survey. Both men showed up at the landslide scene shortly after the occurrence and, like Jones’ friend Ray Hobby, they gravitated toward the source of slide. Wooten and Kuhne ran into each other and discussed their observations. Their primary concern was whether the hillside was stable or was at risk of falling again, potentially burying the rescue workers below.

They both noted a saturation of the soil in the landslide, but not around the edges of the slide, according to Melrose, who took depositions from both men.

“Naturally, I was looking for the source of the water,” Kuhne said in his deposition. “There is (a) water pipe projecting from the slide at that point. So you know, as an observation there (was a) potential source of water for cause of instability in the slope.”

Kuhne ruled out an underground spring

“The soil mass itself was not naturally saturated,” Kuhne said in his deposition. “Coming into the area and driving through the neighborhood, it is what I would characterize as a dry slope.”

“There was no evidence of any underground spring in the scarp area?” Melrose asked Kuhne.

“No,” Kuhne said.

The other option is rain, but Melrose rules that out, too. A weather station in the region recorded 0.74 inches of rain in the 24 hours before the slide, Melrose said.

“There had not been an unusual amount of surface rainfall which would lead to earth movement,” Melrose stated in the claim.