Landslide forces Layton man to leave home

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

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.

Erickson pointed out the Layton home from Chopper 5. Neighbors said the man who lived there was evacuated on Easter Sunday along with his dog.

Now the neighbor's home is 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.

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