Home dangling over Mobile Bay rescued

Workers put steel beams and rollers under Michael and Beverly Courington’s house Tuesday on Lovett Lane in Daphne to move it away from the canyon created in their back yard by Hurricane Danny storm waters.
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We put steel beams and rollers under the home to stabilize it and move it away from the canyon created by Hurricane Danny.

Monday morning’s rains caused the sagging back porch to drop into the Bay. Later that day a house-moving business propped up the cliff side of the house with steel beams to make sure more of it didn’t collapse.

On Tuesday, workers returned and inserted steel beams horizontally under the house, placed it on rollers and moved it about 12 feet from the edge of the cliff, she said.

The beams were hitched to a heavy-duty truck that pulled the house forward a few inches at a time.

She said one plan is to move the house 30 to 40 feet from the edge of the cliff, fill in and reinforce the missing bank, then move it back to near its original location.

Mrs. Courington said she and her husband haven’t ruled out the possibility of giving up and moving elsewhere.

“We are safe, we are sound, we’ve got the prayers of a lot of people, and we know that this is something that we can get through,” she said.

A few miles away across Interstate 10, several families living near a bluff in the 100 block of Patrician Drive West are experiencing their own cliff horrors. The area is near the scenic overlook just off U.S. 90-98.

“A disaster” is the way Thomas Cain, 46, describes the mudslide Sunday that claimed a big chunk of bluff about 60 feet behind his home at 134 Patrician Drive West.

“The wind is blowing again, and we are just sitting back hoping it don’t pour down and rain,” Cain said Tuesday afternoon.

About two months ago, Cain invested $40,000 to have the bluff reinforced by an engineer, he said. The reinforced section of Cain’s bluff held, but another piece faulted and fell, causing about $100,000 in damage to the property, Cain said.

Cain lives next door to Lawson Wilkins and near John Word, owner of the Captain’s Table restaurant on the Causeway.

Wilkins’ and Word’s property suffered the most damage from the mudslides, Cain said. The back porch of Word’s home was about 60 feet from the cliff before the mudslide, but it’s dangerously close now.

Mud, trees and other debris that rolled down the bluffs on Patrician Drive covered the westbound lane of U.S. 90-98.

Crews continued working Tuesday to remove the mess and hopefully reopen the highway today, said Ronnie Poiroux, division engineer with the state Department of Transportation.

Continuing rains have delayed efforts to remove mud from those two lanes, Poiroux said.

“We’re trying to let it dry out some,” he said. “Every time we go to move it, it rains some more.”

A surveyor was on the hillside Tuesday to help establish the highway right-of-way, Poiroux said. Engineers are still studying how to shore up the hillside to prevent further erosion, he said.

(Staff Reporter Buster Kantrow contributed to this report.)