Think back to Christmas 2022. After a couple of single-digit days, the temperature in State College tops out at 16 degrees. Imagine you’re home doing all those cozy, Christmas-y family things – gifts, feasts, football. You’re at the kitchen sink, prepping dinner, when the water stops running.
As you check for frozen pipes, you notice a parked car sinking below the surface of the parking lot. The hole widens. You hear water rushing. It sounds like a waterfall. It sounds like a fire hose.
There’s a race to get cars out of the lot before they’re swallowed. A section of sidewalk collapses. A patio gives way. The hole gets wider and wider. The police go door-to-door, telling everyone to leave.
This was Christmas Day for the residents of 18 townhomes in Park Forest Village.
The renters, some of whom are Penn State graduate students – in other words, probably not rolling in dough – suddenly had to find new places to live, pack up and move.
The homeowners also had to find places to stay while continuing to pay their mortgages, their homeowners association fees, their electric bills and, if they don’t have sinkhole riders on their insurance (few people do), repairs to their property if it’s damaged. Some of them can’t swing it. A couple of residents told the Centre Daily Times in January that they may have to let the bank repo their houses.
Two months after the disaster, there are still signs on all the doors saying, “THIS STRUCTURE HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO BE UNSAFE AND ITS USE OR OCCUPANCY HAS BEEN PROHIBITED BY THE BUILDING CODE OFFICIAL.”
Residents are allowed to enter their houses in the daytime, but they can’t stay overnight. Not that they would want to, since there’s no water or sewer.
Maria Truglio, a professor of Italian at Penn State and an 18-year resident of the Georgetown Townhomes, has been luckier than most. She met me at her townhome on Monday. A Santa Claus lawn decoration lay on its side on the back patio. Inside were stacks of moving boxes. She showed me a crack in the back wall and another in the floor. Neither had been there before Christmas. She told me what her life has been like since that day.
Truglio and her husband had gone out of town for the holiday. They were sitting down to Christmas dinner in New Hampshire when, she said, “our phones started going crazy.”
They tried to ignore them – in some families it’s uncool to take calls at the dinner table, especially on this day of all days – but the summons came in such rapid succession that they finally thought they had better peek.
That’s when they found out what was happening back home.
Now, the couple are about to make their third move. They went from a hotel to temporary lodgings in the home of a kind soul who let them stay for free, and are about to close on a new house. Their possessions are scattered across multiple locations and they’ve been living out of suitcases for two months. Truglio seemed remarkably cheerful, considering.
“You want to move on your own time,” she told me. “Having to do it in panic mode is less than ideal.” On top of all that, she said, “it’s disorienting, because you’re not at home.”
Residents have not been happy about the official response, neither on the day of the disaster nor in the time since. As of this week, the State College Borough Water Authority has repaired the water main and will repave the parking lot when the weather gets warm, but has not accepted responsibility for damage to the homes.
Sinkholes happen, right?
Perhaps, but Truglio and another resident who asked me not to use his name told me it took the Water Authority more than four hours to turn the water off. Had the response been quicker, they said, damage to the homes might not have occurred.
Brian Heiser, director of the Water Authority, told me “there’s a big difference between what they’re saying and the actual events that occurred,” but declined to elaborate, other than to say that generally, there may be multiple valves involved in turning off the water to a main, and that it can take a while to access them.
Adding insult to injury, the Centre Region Code Administration is requiring homeowners to pay for geo-technical reports on the condition of their properties to see if they’re safe to re-inhabit. And if they’re not, the homeowners will have to pay for repairs.
Truglio put it this way:
“The water authority drops a bomb on my house and now I have to pay to figure out how much damage was done. It doesn’t feel fair that these 18 families should have to absorb the cost.”
Some Christmas, huh? Some start to the new year.
