HOUSING + HOMELESSNESS
Developer faces neighbors near Draper home collapse during community meeting
Apr 25, 2023, 9:30 AM | Updated: Apr 26, 2023, 2:52 pm
Draper City community members get emotional during a meeting about the home collapses in their neighborhood April 24, 2023 in Draper, Utah. (Lindsay Aerts/KSL NewsRadio)
(Lindsay Aerts/KSL NewsRadio)
DRAPER, Utah — Neighbors who live near the site of the site of the Draper home collapse are worried their homes could be next. They demanded answers from their builder and developer, Edge Homes, in a community meeting Monday night.
Moving boxes fill the home of Wendy and John Danell. They live one house next to a condemned house with potential to fall and aren’t sleeping in their home.
Representatives for Edge Homes did not allow recording. They told the local media they wanted residents to be able to speak freely. The meeting lasted almost 2 hours.
KSL NewsRadio asked Edge Homes President Gordy Jones after the meeting if the company was at fault.
“We relied on the experts,” he said and declined to be interviewed further. Edge Homes founder and Owner Steve Maddox also took questions from residents, which at times got heated, but declined to be interviewed.
Lots of emotion tonight as @EDGEhomesUT owners Gordy Jones and Steve Maddox faced neighbors who live near two houses that fell off a cliff in Draper. They’re demanding daily reports, soil/engineering histories, and today’s market value compensation for the victims.@kslnewsradio pic.twitter.com/ZObdBYE9NE
— Lindsay Aerts (@LindsayOnAir) April 25, 2023
Worries and aftermath
Wendy Danell lives right next door to a third house that officials believe could also fall.
“I want them to address the safety issues and share the reports of the dirt, the soil, the native soil. I want to know how secure my house is,” she told KSL NewsRadio after the meeting.
Edge Homes is paying for her family to stay in a hotel. Wendy said she won’t sleep in her house “until she feels safe.”
As people took turns expressing frustrations, residents demanded things like daily reports of any work the developer does to secure the area. They want the engineering and native soil reports — to know if their homes sit on the same type of man-made dirt that fell off the hillside, taking two homes with it.
They also demanded today’s market value compensation for their neighbors, specifically Carole and Eric Kamradt, the owners of one of the collapsed homes who’ll go to remediation with Edge in the coming weeks, along with the owners of the second home that fell.
“Hearing [Edge] now say all the mistakes they made to me that were so preventable, I got a little angry,” said Carole Kamradt when asked if she was satisfied with the answers she heard during the meeting.
The Kamradts first brought the issues of their cracking homes to Edge in February of 2022 and they had moved in three months prior.
“Okay, you’re saying this now. Why didn’t you say this a year ago when we were trying to tell you,” she asked.
Cause of the Draper home collapse?
Jones and Maddox didn’t pinpoint the cause of the slide for the group, nor did they admit fault with any of their hired subcontractors. They did admit the failure of the engineered soil and retaining walls and agreed to help residents in any way that they could.
“Was this a design failure by the engineers? Was this a construction failure by the excavators and retaining wall companies? Was this a combination of both, or neither? We simply cannot answer these questions today. More analysis and data are necessary, but we are committed to
finding the underlying cause of the problems to ensure they do not happen again,” a statement from Edge Homes reads, from which Jones read aloud at the meeting
Jones went on to say the companies that built the support walls in the soil had “proven track records” and that they went through a review by Draper City.
