The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone
Eleven Pages
The report came in on a Thursday evening, eleven pages with a cover letter and his stamp on the last one. I read it standing at my kitchen counter with the dishes still in the sink, and by the third page my hands were not entirely steady.
The first pages confirmed everything my husband and I had suspected twenty years earlier and everything Norm had believed for two decades after that. The slope beneath Catbird Ridge sat on unstable clay fill over fractured limestone, exactly the kind of ground that moves without a retaining structure holding it in place. My wall, the report stated in language plainer than I expected an engineer to use, was not decorative. It was a load bearing structure actively preventing a slope failure that would affect all three downhill properties, foremost among them the house directly behind it, currently owned by Rita.
But it was the middle section that changed everything. The engineer had found clear evidence that the recent pool excavation on Rita’s property had cut into the toe of the slope, the exact point where a hillside needs the most support, without any engineering review or county permit on file. Worse, the drainage line running off her new patio slab had been rerouted to empty directly onto the upper edge of the slope instead of into the existing stormwater system, adding a steady flow of water to ground that was already carrying more weight than it was built for.
The crack I had found was not random. It was the hillside’s first warning that the combination of my wall coming under threat and Rita’s own unpermitted excavation had already begun to move the ground beneath both our properties.
The final page carried a formal recommendation, in the driest possible language, that any modification or removal of the existing retaining wall be halted immediately pending a full engineering review, and that the recent excavation and drainage work on the adjoining property be evaluated by the county for permit compliance before any further construction proceeded.
Rita’s name was right there on that last page, next to the words unpermitted excavation, in a report she did not know existed yet.