Dramatic video captured over the weekend shows two empty homes in Draper, Utah, as they collapsed and slid off a cliff into a canyon.
In the shocking video, the top half of a two-storey home severs from its foundation and slips away while police and helpless onlookers watch from the street.
In a second clip, a single-storey home completely destabilizes and crumbles into itself with a series of cracks and groans.
The homes, both on the same street in Draper, were evacuated in October 2022 after the city revoked their certificates of occupancy. At the time, Draper police said the homes were “unfit for human habitation” due to dangerous conditions caused by shifting earth.
Thankfully, no one was injured when the houses collapsed during the landslide.
“We kept hoping it wasn’t going to end up like this,” Carole Kamradt, owner of one of the collapsed houses, told KSL-TV. “I visualized a lot of things for our lives in this home and they were all wonderful and beautiful. And looking at this now, it’s a nightmare.”
Kamradt, who lived in the house less than a year, told the outlet she wished she could retrieve scrapbooks and other family mementos from the rubble. She said she and her family will now “move forward and find another dream.”
Kamradt’s daughter, Amanda Wardlow, told FOX-13 her family spotted obvious problems with the home after they moved in, including cracking drywall, audible pops in the roof, cracks in the driveway and shifting earth under the lawn.
David Dobbins, a representative from the City of Draper, said the area where the homes were built used to be a ravine. He said the developer’s engineers used fill dirt to make the area buildable as part of “a plan that they thought would work.”
The foundational collapse of the houses led to two more adjacent residences also being evacuated. Nearby hiking trails were closed as a result of the landslide.
Officials from the City of Draper have said “snowpack melting and creating changes” in the earth may have led to the landslide.
The area is being assessed for additional sliding risks.
Edge Homes, the developer of the two collapsed residences and other still-standing properties in the Hidden Canyon Estates area, has been in talks with the City of Draper for months now about the stability of these homes.
Though Edge Homes previously disagreed with the city’s decision to evacuate the since-collapsed homes, it has now said weather conditions led to the destruction.
“Due to record snowfall and winter conditions, efforts to stabilize and repair the homes were put on hold until after the spring runoff,” Edge Homes said in a statement to Fox-13. It added that the properties “are no longer salvageable.”
The company reportedly bought back one of the homes in January for an “acceptable price.” The second collapsed home is still under negotiation.