Family heartbroken as home crumbles in Layton landslide

LAYTON, Utah — Warming temperatures have caused more problems for Utah neighborhoods including a Layton home that was evacuated because of another mudslide.

“It’s so heartbreaking losing your parents and then losing their legacy,” Teri Phelps told KSL. She still can’t believe the state her family home is in. “Has been really hard.”

So much of the home has moved recently.

“This curb was lined up all the way, all the way now you can see how far it has moved,” she said. “You can see cracks by the garage door. You can see cracks, partway up the wall.”

She got a call on Easter Sunday. “Our renter was saying he could hear water moving under the asphalt out by the driveway.”

She said the man who lives there with his dog then called firefighters.

“They came out and they told him that he needed to be out of the house for a couple of days until it settled down.”

But it never did and the next day he was evacuated.

Layton City then dug a trench above the property to divert water away from the home.

“It has continued to move so much further, as time has gone. And I know that it’s really scary for some of the neighbors up the hill because our house right now is the only thing that is holding that hill up,” Phelps said.

She is heartbroken to see the place in this state — but is grateful it’s just a home.

“Hang onto the things that really matter. That’s what’s most important, I still have my family, and our renter is OK,” she said.

Earlier Thursday Chopper 5 took Department of Natural Resources geologist Ben Erickson up for a look at the damage to that home and the potential for additional damaging landslides.

“When you’re in a car you don’t really recognize what’s above what you’re able to see out your window,” Erickson said. “Looks like there has been some movement.”

The view from Chopper 5 showed how large some of the active slides are in northern Utah.

Erickson said, “If things are nice and crisp, easy to see crack lines, that means it has really recent movement.”

At one house, crews were working to prevent the slide from getting worse.

“If you look above the slide, you can see how much snow is piled up there,” Erickson pointed out. “Just drifted with the wind. That’s also going to be a potential of adding more water to it which can destabilize it from where it’s at.”

Erickson said there are warning signs people should watch for. “If you have a steep slope that’s the first indication that there’s potential problems there. If there’s consistent water coming out of it, that’s a major warning sign.”

He said oversaturation on the ground causes problems.

“If you can see tears in the surface where the fissures and ground cracks are opening up, it can take quite a bit of time for them to open or it can be rapid,” he explained.

 

A Layton man was evacuated from his home after a landslide seriously damaged the property.
Coming up at @KSL5TV at 6, I talk to his neighbors about the landslide threat they’re facing, plus we go up in Chopper 5 to get a look at landslides and areas under a threat. pic.twitter.com/L7fdN6xVKx

— Shelby Lofton (@newswithShelby) April 20, 2023

A neighbor who lives next to the Phelps home said her home is now threatened.

“We have lived in this neighborhood for 37 years and there are lots of underground springs,” Gayle Featherstone said. “The neighbor who lived here came out and told us he’d heard noises, loud noises just a couple of hours before. Went downstairs and his basement floor, which was cement, had cracked and looked a lot like this asphalt.”

She said crews from the city come out every day.

“They had assessed the threat and called our neighborhood A1 and told us to have some bags ready to go if we needed to evacuate in the middle of the night,” Featherstone said.

She’s seen water run throughout her neighborhood, but nothing as powerful as this. “We are a family of six and we are a little older and it would be hard to start over. It would be hard to lose our home.”

The city said this landslide is moving slowly and crews are working to stop it.

“That’s what that trench is right behind the head scar, is to drain the water away from it so it doesn’t add more water to it,” Erickson said.