WHAS11 coverage

Louisville, Ky. (WHAS11) - A Louisville woman is at her wits end watching her house of 42-years crack and crumble before her eyes.

Patricia Zeller claims her problems began after the metropolitan sewer district did some blasting on a new sewer project.

She called WHAS11’s Andy Treinen, he called the Metro Sewer District and together they’ve worked out an agreement.

“I want my house fixed and I think they should be liable for it,” says Zeller.

Patricia Zeller has lived in this house on St. Bernard court for 42 years.

For the first 32 it was her home sweet home.

And now?

“My whole house is cracked all the way from the front porch all the way to the back and the basement too,” she says.

To date Patricia has spent over $22,000 dollars trying to fix her problem. 

And the problem is pretty clear.  But the source of the problem12 years after MSD installed new sewers behind the house is much harder to put a finger on.

“The possibility here could be anything. I mean I can’t sit here with any certainty and say there wasn’t blasting damage. It’s very difficult to determine after about 12 years.”

Add to that 12 year time span the two contractors who’ve worked trying to secure her foundation. She has receipts from Alph C. Kaufman after two piers were installed in the basement in 2003. But still Zellers walls continue to crack.

Zeller thinks the cracking was caused by dynamite that was set off back behind her house.

“The man was sitting underneath my window when he set it off,” she says.

It took some time for the cracks to surface, and Zeller says when she called MSD to file a complaint they told her the warranty was up.  But MSD has no record of that phone call. 

Bud Shardein of MSD said Zeller has called twice; once about a drainage problem and once about a rate adjustment. But Zeller remembers it differently.

“She just said they can’t help me because I don’t have any proof. If I could prove it was their fault she said maybe we could get some help,” says Zeller.

Now before they did any blasting MSD did send crews out into the neighborhood to check and survey all these homes. They checked all the walls in the homes looking for cracks. And Patricia says the only crack was documented in her home.

“They took pictures and there was only that two inch crack on that opening there between the dinning and the living room,” she says.

“They took pictures in my home of the rooms and there were just two tiny cracks that really didn’t have anything to do with them,” she says.

Patricia’s neighbor, Al Desilets, has had no problem since the blasting, but he remembers the pre-blast photographs. MSD says it’s the contractor’s insurance company that does the pre-blast analysis.  WHAS11 News has requested and is still waiting for that report from 1996 and the pictures.

In the meantime Schardein is being pro-active.

“What I’d like to offer Miss Zeller is I can have a structural engineer, I understand she’s already had one look at her property and determined her problems aren’t due to blasting, but I’d be happy at MSD’s expense to have another structural engineer take a look at it,” he says.

Patricia Zeller is pleased that MSD is going to take a look at her problem.

 If you have a consumer problem you'd like Andy to look into send an e-mail to consumerwatch@whas11.com.