Edmonton has seen near-constant rain over the summer and it’s affecting not just new housing developments in the city, but the properties flanking the construction too.
Concerns are mounting for homeowners near infill projects who feel their properties are at risk each time a storm hits.
Claire Spicer and her husband live in the Glenwood neighbourhood in the west end.
When a bad storm rolled into Edmonton three weeks ago, her house and the infill development next door were hit hard.
“The edges of the excavation site all fell in, and with it, it took all of our landscaping on the side of our property.”
Spicer said parts of their yard is now in the pit next door.
“There was some beautiful rock that my husband had put in, he’d done all the grading. It took the retaining wall with it — it’s half gone,” said Spicer.
An eightplex is being built next door, and excavation on the site started on Friday, July 17.
The developers said shoring was in progress the following day, but the night of Saturday, July 18, severe weather hit the city. A fierce storm dumped a large amount of rain over the west end in a short time period.
With proper shoring not yet in place, in the aftermath of the storm, the site looked like a swimming pool.
“This is a serious safety concern,” Spicer said. “There’s easily accessible ways right now, even for a child or a dog, to get into this excavation site.
“After that rain on July 18, there was about two feet of water at the bottom of the excavation site, and it took four days for that to get pumped out,” she said.
In a statement, the developer of the infill property Aadesh Projects told Global News they have been working over the past few weeks to mitigate risks and prevent any further soil collapse.
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Aadesh Projects said with rain systems continuing from July 19 until Aug. 2, it created site constraints and left no safe window to restore the shoring.
“We take our responsibility to protect our workforce and our neighbours’ interests with the utmost seriousness,” read the statement.
“We will officially begin progressing with securing the side slopes and finalizing the shoring during the second half of Wednesday, August 5.”
Spicer says the timeline for when the work will be complete keeps getting pushed back.
“He says the issue will be rectified, but when I ask for specific dates by which this will be done, he gives me a date, and then it isn’t done,” Spicer said.
“Distressing to see the damage to my property just increasing every day and not really knowing when it will get fixed and what it will look like at the end of the day.”
Others living in the neighbourhood are also worried about storms and construction.
An infill development is going up beside Richard Grono’s home.
He says all the rain recently has led to parts of his lawn falling into the pit and his fences are nearly tipped over.
“They’ve come, they’ve pumped this out four times, and that’s it. Nothing happens. If this fence comes down on one of us while we’re walking, what happens?” Grono questioned.
“If I lose my fence, what happens to my sidewalk?”
Both Spicer and Grono are on edge — literally — waiting to see what happens with future storms.
They hope speaking out leads to changes.
“I don’t know how the city is, first of all, allowing the excavation sites to come this close to the property lines,” Spicer said.
“If all it takes is a little bit of rain for it to cave in and cause this level of destruction, I think there needs to be some changes to the city bylaws.”
Global News reached out to the City of Edmonton for comment but as of publishing, had not received a response.
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