The District of Sechelt has been talking with the house-moving firm Nickel Brothers about whether it’s possible to move buildings out of the evacuated Seawatch neighbourhood.
District officials have been reluctant to discuss details of which ideas they’re pursuing to help property owners after the subdivision was evacuated on Feb. 15 because of the threat of new sinkholes.
The discussions with Nickel Brothers came to light during the public question and answer session of the Mar. 20 council meeting.
Seawatch residents in the gallery asked, as they have been at every meeting since the evacuation, when the district will allow people back into the neighbourhood to retrieve the possessions they had to leave behind and whether they will be compensated.
Chief administrative officer Andrew Yeates said, when it comes to temporary access, “We don’t have any idea yet. We’ve got a long way to go on figuring out how to pay for it and how to go about it, and we’re still waiting for people to tell us what they need. Not all the residents have gotten back to us.”
A Mar. 19 email to Seawatch property owners said the estimates so far put the cost of adequately reinforcing the road in the range of $400,000 to $600,000. “Council has not discussed this yet and so it is not known who would assume responsibility for this expense,” the email said.
Mayor Darnelda Siegers said after hearing from the provincial ministries of public safety and housing and municipal affairs that compensation under the disaster financial assistance program is still not an option, “We are reaching out to the ministers as next step, and we are going to have a meeting with them.”
The questions around the house moving idea were tied to comments in the Mar. 19 email from the district and a related report from Thurber Engineering.
The email said the district received recommendations from Thurber “regarding the transportation of houses across municipal roads in the Seawatch neighbourhood” and that the district met with Nickel Brothers which “is interested in the project” and is now reviewing the recommendations from Thurber.
According to Thurber, the company began investigating the idea for the district after being forwarded a quote one of the Seawatch homeowners got from Nickel Brothers in late January.
The Thurber recommendations said, “use of the closed roadways will require implementation of engineering controls to mitigate risks to people and property. Controls may include temporary bridging and temporary ground improvement. The potential for any slope modification or ground improvement to exacerbate the existing hazards must also be considered.”
Thurber also points out the difficulty of moving large sections of building on the roads outside the Sinkhole Management Area (SMA).
“As an alternative, consideration could be given to moving the house(s) to the shoreline to be loaded on barges. Another option could be to use a heavy lift helicopter to move portions of the structure(s) to a staging area outside of the SMA,” the Thurber report says. “The feasibility of these alternative approaches would need to be confirmed.”
Seawatch property owners Greg and Gerry Latham told council they were surprised so much effort was going into the house-moving idea without consulting residents. Gerry Latham also said previous discussions with Nickel Brothers after a home was evacuated in 2015 showed the cost would be very high, and even then, only part of most Seawatch homes is suitable for moving.
Siegers said the district wants to know about any possible option. “In our conversations going forward with other levels of government, or with whoever, the more information that we can have to take into any of those conversations will inform everybody. If we’re told in the end they can’t be moved, we know that’s off the table and it’s not an option for anybody,” she said.
“We’re a little bit bemused the district is spending this amount of time and energy to look at this versus determining who might step up to the table, closing the roads by bylaw, negotiating compensation, seeking expropriation of the land,” Greg Latham said. “That’s what we thought you’d be spending your time on.”
