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Community
‘Cliff dwellers' fight for their homes
Town meeting set for Feb. 20
Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Monique Hailer looks out the sliding glass door of her Lusby home perched on the eroding Calvert Cliffs on Friday which shows how close the house now is to the cliff after a large section with a hot tub collapsed in late November.
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Bill Carmichael went to bed last Thanksgiving with a small backyard that included a stone patio and a hot tub. He awoke the next morning to find the hot tub had moved — about 50 feet down the cliff face that now sits a few strides from his home in the Chesapeake Ranch Estates. Erosion had slowly eaten away at the 12-square-foot section of earth supporting the tub, causing a mini-landslide overnight.
Carmichael's thoughts that morning immediately zeroed on the youngest members of his family, who were over for the holiday and had been told the previous day to stay out of the hot tub, which at the time sat right on the cliff edge.
"All the kids were here and they were all out there on the hot tub on my deck and we told them to get off because the cliffs were eroding," Carmichael said. "I came down [the next morning] and I just knew something was wrong ... I'm looking around and I noticed the hot tub was gone ... and I walked out there and the kids all stay up until 3 [a.m.] these days and I remember thinking, ‘God I hope I don't see some little legs sticking out of this dirt pile.' That was my gut feeling." Fortunately, Richardson's hot tub was the only casualty that day.
When Carmichael bought the property in 1991, his house was 60 feet from the edge and the county recommended he armor the cliff's toe to prevent further erosion.
But Carmichael, along with 90-or-so other cliff-front property owners in the Lusby community, has found significant opposition to any efforts that might protect his home from eroding and eventually falling into the Chesapeake Bay. But he and the self-named "cliff dwellers" have been stonewalled by agencies at every level of government that say any measures taken to reduce the cliff erosion must not affect the habitat or mating of the federally endangered Puritan tiger beetle. His house is now less than 30 feet from the edge, his property line extending a third of the way down the cliff face.
The beetle is only found at certain locations along the Chesapeake Bay and the Connecticut River in New England. In-county population counts vary widely from year to year — from more than 11,000 in 1988 to a little more than 2,000 last year.
While they spend most of their lives under sand and mate on beaches, the beetles also lay eggs within the natural cliff erosion. So, any attempt to limit the cliff erosion could be seen as a threat to the tiger beetle, Cicindela puritana. At the same time, allowing the erosion to continue unabated poses a very real threat to the homes and, potentially, lives of the human beings, Homo sapiens, atop the cliffs.
Those below the cliffs are also at risk — in 1996, a 12-year-old girl was walking along the beach below the cliffs when a landslide buried her. She died before rescuers could dig her out. The community has since put up signs declaring the beach off-limits.
Monique Hailer, Carmichael's girlfriend of many years, is scared to venture too close to the edge, for fear that too thin an overhang might claim her as it did the hot tub.
"I really didn't understand it until Thanksgiving, until the earth moved and all those kids would have been dead and buried," Hailer said. "Anytime somebody comes around my house I kind of yell at them and tell them to come in because I don't want them out there."
The community recently closed a 500-foot section of Golden West Way that was dangerously close to the cliff edge. Commuters, school buses and emergency vehicles now must take a long detour around to reach the other side of the blockade. But that is better than what could happen if the road had remained open, said John Eney, president of the community's property owners association. All of CRE's roads are privately owned and maintained.
The road closure and recent landslides like the one on Carmichael's property prompted the attention of several local television stations, which aired reports on the situation last month.
A week later, the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners sent letters to U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md., 5th) and U.S. Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D) and Ben Cardin (D) asking for help. The letters were a welcome and fresh showing of support from the local government, Eney said.
Dave Ector and his wife, Lydia Cucurull, bought their cliff-front property only 20 months ago, but not until they were assured by a contracted engineer that erosion had barely affected the property since its house was built four decades ago.
Then one day around last Christmas, Ector returned home to find a 10-foot chunk missing from the right side of his yard and a massive pile of earth and rock at the bottom of the cliffs. Now he too worries that his home, which is fewer than 10 feet from the edge, might be close behind.
"If we can't fix it, if we're not allowed by the state to stabilize the cliff, which is definitely doable, our property values have probably dropped at least a hundred-grand," Ector said. "You also have to worry about if you can sell. Who would buy with the house on the edge of the cliff?"
Cucurull, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist with a doctorate in physics, has found little or weak scientific evidence in the reports and studies on which the beetle's protection is based. She is currently working on and expects to finish a peer-review of one of the more recent studies within a few weeks.
"They would kick me out completely from the scientific community" for publishing something similar, she said. "I've never seen anything that bad."
Ector and his wife consider themselves environmentalists — they spent thousands installing eco-friendly geothermal energy systems in their home.
"We've both come out on the environmental side of every vote you can think of," he said. In addition to protecting his home and those of his neighbors, erosion controls would also keep tons of silt and nitrates from breaking off the cliffs and flooding the bay, Ector said.
Fellow "cliff dweller" Tony Vajda has served as the group's unofficial spokesman, bookkeeper, legal analyst and government liaison for about 15 years.
Retired from the Army Core of Engineers, Vajda now works full-time hours researching and lobbying local, state and federal politicians and officials for the right to protect his and others' property.
Vajda was allowed to install offshore breakwaters, which reduce wave action and cut down on erosion, but at a hefty price — Carmichael and his neighbor spent roughly $60,000 installing the concrete reef balls and estimates Vajda and his neighbors spent at least $90,000. But since the homeowners were not allowed to backfill the breakwaters with sand, they have done little to impede the erosion, Vajda said. If anything, the "cliff dwellers" have seen the erosion pick up as it creeps closer to their homes.
While the community seeks a "happy medium" with the government, there is little more it can do besides repeat what has already been tried, Vajda said.
"We the people can help, but we put them in leadership positions to make decisions," he said of government officials.
Del. Anthony O'Donnell (R-Calvert, St. Mary's), a longtime political ally of the "cliff dwellers," is quick to point out that the problem is not unique to the CRE, but extends up the county's eastern shore to communities like Western Shores, Governor's Run, Scientists Cliffs and Randle Cliffs.
He has accompanied state officials on boated tours alongside the cliffs and sponsored a 2005 bill that gave the Department of Natural Resources secretary authority to permit "incidental takings" of tiger beetle habitat for the purpose of preserving property. But no such permits have been issued, and O'Donnell is sponsoring another bill for the current session that will alter the words "may issue" in the 2005 bill to "shall issue."
"There has to be a way, whether it's moving the endangered species to another habitat, there has to be a way to allow these people to save their homes," he said.
Hailer said that while losing a house would hurt significantly, it wouldn't be crippling for people like her and Carmichael, who have both had successful business careers and own multiple houses. But most of her neighbors living along the cliffs would have nothing left, she said.
"There's just some people where it's their livelihood, this is all they have," Hailer said. "This is their retirement and everything they've worked for and this is it. They have nowhere else to go, their homes have no value and what do you do? You've worked your whole life for this."
In another attempt to address the issue, O'Donnell has scheduled a town meeting for Feb. 20 at 1 p.m. at the Crossroad Christian Church on the corner of Route 2/4 and Ball Road in St. Leonard.
"If we allow people to be ruined, that is to say made bankrupt because they lose their lifetime investment or lose their homes, I believe it will eventually serve to allow the development in a lost confidence in the Endangered Species Act," O'Donnell said. "The Endangered Species Act has done a lot of good, don't get me wrong. No one enjoys seeing a bald eagle fly more than I do … but in these situations where it appears through bureaucratic intransigence, that officials are reluctant to provide help for real-life people, then it goes just a little bit too far."
