Lucas Warkentin said that when he saw the river of mud in his driveway on Wednesday morning, “it took all of two seconds” to realize something was very wrong.
Mud from a landslide on the opposite side of the street from his house in the 7800 block of 264 Street cascaded across the road and down his driveway and into the carport.
Some of it seeped into his house when he answered a knock on the door at 6:30 a.m. Armed with flashlights, Langley Township firefighters asked him to leave his house.
Warkentin said he had slept through the night’s heavy rain. Something stirred him at 4:30 a.m., but he went straight back to sleep again until he heard the knock on his door. He thinks that it may have been at 4:30 a.m. that the mud slid down his driveway.
When he looked outside, he was stunned. “It looked like a gravel truck backed into my driveway and dumped a load of mud. Then I thought, who did I make mad?”
There is more than three feet of mud on his driveway. His car, a Dodge Charger, took the brunt of the slide, Warkentin said.
Fortunately, his house sustained no structural damage.
But an email which he received at 8:30 p.m. from the Township left him “disappointed.”
It stated that he was responsible for cleaning up the mud and the five concrete barriers which were swept down onto his property from the edge of the road.
“That’s my disappointment,” he said. “Other than that, I was fortunate. It could have taken out my house.”
Later on Thursday (Nov. 1), Township engineering manager Ramin Seifi toured the slide site and Warkentin’s property.
Seifi confirmed that once the critical work of the road cleanup has been completed and 264 Street is safe for the public, the Township will remove the concrete barriers from Warkentin’s property, and help as much as possible with clearing the other debris from the private property.