Strong bones my rear
News 4 reported a house on the 1200 block of New Jersey Ave has slid off it's foundation. I was chatting with Truxtonian and he mentioned how the bricks of this houses are not built on a slab. Just bricks on dirt. Yes, people, some of you are just living on bricks, on dirt. You have no real stable foundation. Throw in a little digging, a little rain, you've got either a collapsed wall or, in this case, a leaning rowhouse. Looks like it may have been 1242 NJ Ave NW.Unless you have seen your foundation, your rafters, the bones of your house, just accept that it may just be standing by the grace of G-d, and not because it has strong bones.
The DCFD also has coverage of the house as well.
posted by Mari @ 16.5.06
4 Comments:
love it. I mean, no I don't love it, but it's wackiness like this that does fill in the 'OMG!' section of the DCist. I checked and the assessed value of the fallend house - $455K. The house it fell on - $640K. Whoops.
As someone who is watching carefully to see whether this happens on his block... it's pretty concerning.
The real issue is that the laborers doing a lot of the work don't care about much more than getting the work done, getting paid and hopefully getting home safely. I'm watching a place that's getting gutted and though I'm not a structural engineer, I can tell that more should be done to brace the existing structure. But it's not being done. Why? Becuase it costs more.
The Mt. Vernon Square listserv is jumping on this and there are several good souls who want to help a senior citizen (75 yo) who was renting. I'm waiting to see if any of the MVSA officers investigate further to see if it is necessary to set up something to take donations to help the unnamed woman who has now lost everything.
I saw just the picture on the news and couldn't fathom how it could just lean over like that, but now you've explained it, well tada.
When I first moved to DC, I lived on 15th & Chapin NW and was interviewing with my landlord for the apartment I was looking at. Just down the street stood a vacant (or seemed so) apartment building. A week later when I returned to turn in my deposit, it had apparently "slipped" due to heavy rains and slid backwards. Not sure if it was a foundation issue, but my landlord told me it had not been vacant for long at all. Of course they just covered it with a tarp and it sat like that until after I moved out 2 years later.
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