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Tim Welsh (left) and Rodney Krause discuss work needed to repair a sinkhole found Sunday in a road leading to a Spotsylvania home. |
By GEORGE WHITEHURST
On Sunday, the Hartless family's spirits had fallen into a pit of despair as deep as the sinkhole that swallowed their driveway.
But yesterday, some good neighbors stepped forward to help the Spotsylvania County family.
The owners of Rappahannock Construction Co. Inc. and Joy Construction Inc. are furnishing the material, equipment and labor needed to bridge the gulf that opened up Saturday night on the Hartlesses' driveway, aka Honeysuckle Road.
An RCCI tractor-trailer bearing a massive excavator pulled up in front of Honeysuckle Road about 2:30 p.m. yesterday to get ready for the repair work.
That was a welcome sight to Tom Hartless, who has spent the last three days using a debris-laden, rutted access road to get in and out of his home.
"Yesterday we didn't know where to turn," he said. "We're pretty fortunate. We live in a good county."
Tim Welsh, owner of RCCI, was ready to pitch in after reading about the Hartless family's plight in yesterday's Free Lance-Star.
"There's only a few people capable of doing something like this. I'm just glad to help out," he said.
Joe Plummer, owner of Joy Construction, agreed, saying he will donate whatever it takes to fix the problem.
"Nobody should have to go through this," he said. "Hopefully it won't cost this lady a cent."
As of late yesterday, Luck Stone Inc. and Fredericksburg-based Somerset Homes also had offered assistance.
Television crews from Richmond and Washington showed up yesterday to get footage of the sinkhole, which is at least 20 feet wide and between 12 and 16 feet deep.
It was all a little overwhelming for Anna Hartless, who was tearfully scrambling on Monday to find a way out of her predicament.
Yesterday, she could laugh about the "media out the wazoo" who were crawling all over her property.
She also was singing the praises of Supervisor Emmitt Marshall who called her yesterday morning to say that some private-sector help was on the way.
"I said, 'Well, sir, I don't have that kind of money.' And he said, 'Ma'am, don't worry about it,'" Anna Hartless recalled. "It was unbelievable. I was lost for words, and started crying all over again."
Honeysuckle Road is a private gravel road, meaning it isn't eligible for state or county maintenance funds.
The Hartless family started having problems after Hurricane Isabel damaged the culvert pipe that funneled a creek under the road. As a result, the creek began eroding the earthen ridge that supported the road.
"What that does is create a head, and instead of water just passing through, now you've got a whole lot of pressure against [the ridge]," Welsh said. "It's kind of like filling your bathtub up--you don't want to be on the downstream end when you pull the plug."
The plug got pulled over the weekend, when heavy rains caused the road to collapse.
Tom Hartless has tried a variety of temporary fixes since 2003, but lacked the money to fully repair the problem.
But at 7 a.m. today, crews from Joy Construction and RCCI will start cleaning out the sink hole before laying a pair of concrete culvert pipes along the bottom. They'll then fill the hole with tightly packed dirt and broken concrete.
Melvin Bennett, who handles erosion issues for Spotsylvania County, said yesterday there's a lesson to be learned from the incident--keep a careful eye on stormwater-drainage around your home.
All Spotsylvanians, he said, need to regularly check and clean their drainage ditches and culvert pipes.
"If it gets blocked, address it as soon as possible," he said while gazing down into the sinkhole.
To reach GEORGE WHITEHURST:
Email: gwhitehurst@freelancestar.com
