i first read of the plan to expand the
FORD R&D campus in mid-april 2016. to say i was horrified is an
understatement. I typed out letters and left them with neighbors who
all seemed to think i was a lunatic. I posted questions and
information about it on many facebook forums, and was instantly
denounced as being a lying, slanderous, spreader of misinformation.
No one took me seriously.
Well, mostly no one. The neighborhood
association i belong to took interest, which i am still very thankful
for. They planned to have FORD LAND representatives attend the next
assc meeting so they could give us an overview of the project. Before
this meeting happened, though, the test piles were started. Each
parking deck was going to need many piles to hold the weight of the
structures being constructed, and FORD had to make sure the piles
would hold the way they should. While eating breakfast one morning in
early may, our house started shaking and the windows were rattling. I
was about to leave for work when my neighbor deb was on the sidewalk
in front of my house. She was beside herself with worry. She asked me
what was going on, and i told her about the FORD plan and the testing
and the upcoming meeting. She lives in the only other house on
elmdale, and the test pile was quite literally across from her front
door, and about 300 or so feet from my front door. She said her whole
house was shaking and the glasses in her cupboards were rattling and
she was scared. I took my husband to work and then emailed the only
contact i had for the FORD property – a land manager named Joe
Vicari. He is our neighborhood contact for any time the complex gets
too loud – like when a building is belching or the resurfacing crew
works too late at night. He is in charge of keeping the peace btwn
the home owners and the R&D complex. He agreed to meet me at the
house, and when he arrived around noon that day he had another man
with him who i will call short erik. They came into our house,
listened, looked around, mentioned that they could see our windows
moving, and asked if they could come back the next day with different
members of the work crew and investigate further, as tests would be
ongoing for a few days. I said yes.
The next day (and yes, somewhere i have
dates for all of this – i wrote down notes as often as i could
remember) my neighbor deb came over and we waited for the FORD guys.
We talked about how awful it was to have our houses shake like that.
How we worried about the damage that was going to happen from that
kind of long term movement. Just before 11am, the 2 FORD employees
came, tall erik and short erik, and they were cordial and friendly.
They stood in my living room and we waited until 11am when the
testing was going to resume on the pile just out front of deb's
house. 11Am came, and nothing happened. Tall erik said the crew was
testing – he had been on the phone with the foreman, right as work
began at 11am, and obviously there was no issue at all with what they
were doing as the house was quiet and nothing was shaking. Deb and i
both protested as this was not at all what had been happening the day
before. Tall erik assured us we would have no problems with the
construction. He explained a parking deck would take 8 hours of pile
vibration per day for 8 weeks, simply to get the footings into place
for them to build on. Deb and i were horrified. We were sure our
houses would have collapsed by then.
This whole time, i had been looking out
the window. I could see the pile from the living room. This
particular morning, with the two eriks in my house, there was no
crane near the pile, no machinery to shake it, and no workers. Deb
and i kept telling the two eriks that nothing was happening, and tall
erik, who was on the phone with his crew, swore they were working. He
finally suggested we walk over to the fence that sits btwn our houses
and the construction site and see it all in person.
The four of us walked over to the pile.
There was no crane, no vibrating machine, no workers. Deb and i looked
at each other in astonishment. How was this man trying to tell us
work was being done here?
Tall erik looked around and said the
crew must be done already. And then deb and i protested. We had not
seen the crane today, we had not seen any workers. Deb asked where
was the big blue machine that sat atop the pile and shook it so
vigorously? Tall erik told us repeatedly that they workers were
already done and gone. And we would not let him out of it that
easily. We bugged him until he called the foreman of the crew and
asked what was going on. The foreman said the crew was working –
they were testing a pile right then – just not the pile tall erik
thought they were testing. They had not been in front of our houses
that morning, and tall erik had spent 45 minutes trying to convince
us the noise and vibration would not bother us.......when tall erik
said the crew had actually been working elsewhere, short erik looked
at him and said "oh great" with an incredible snarkiness in
his voice. Tall erik said the crew would be back in our area at 2pm
and they would return at that point to meet with us again and see
what was actually happening in our homes when the pile was being
vibrated. The 2 eriks left.
Deb and i sat on my porch and talked
about how upset we were and how we felt we were being lied to and
bamboozled. We felt extremely alone and forgotten about. Hopeless.
I went inside and emailed the main page
of our neighborhood association. I told the whole story of all the
stuff that had happened that morning, and said it was very difficult
to feel like deb and i were alone against the world. The president of
our neighborhood association, the SODA group, works from home some
days. He was home, and he took time out of his afternoon to come over
at 2pm when the pile would be tested again. He came over to stand
with us and help us feel not so small and insignificant. Tim
Shaw-Harrison. Boy was i surprised to see him, and very glad. We also
had one more neighbor join us for the 2pm event. FORD LAND had the 2
eriks return,and one more man who was monitoring vibrations, and we
all stood in the living room of my home while the pile vibration
started. This time – there was no denying what was happening.
We all experienced the windows move in
and out. I have old casement windows and their metal frames most
certainly heaved in and out, each time forcing a wall of air into the
room. This was amplified in the back of the house, and in the
upstairs bedrooms it felt as if we were at a loud rock concert –
that wall of sound hitting you in the chest, except this was air from
the windows heaving. All the plants in the house shook. All the
dishes in the kitchen, the toaster oven, the walls. My whole house
was moving in direct response to the vibrating pile that was 300 or
so feet from my home. It was awful. And all the FORD workers could
feel and hear it.
Then we walked down to deb's house –
directly across from the pile testing. And immediately inside her
house i had to sit down. I have vertigo. It is set off by loud sound,
low bass rumbles, and floor movement. Her house was shaking so badly
i could not stand up in it. I had immediately lost my balance and was
very sick to my stomach. The noise and movement in my home had been
bad, but in her house it was 10 times worse. Everythng moved,
everything shook and rattled and you could see the vibrations going
through every thing in her house. It was very frightening. My house
was uncomfortable and scary to me, and her house was so much worse.
How on earth were we going to live through this? Through a huge long
term construction process that was going to ruin our homes?
The group of us returned to my house.
We stood in the living room. Me, deb, diana, and tim, along with 3
FORD guys. And the FORD guys said we would have no ill effects from
the construciton. That our houses would be fine. It was their opinion
and experience that we would not suffer cracked walls or foundations,
we would not have anything broken, we would not lose value on our
homes due to damage from construction. Tall erik mentioned a program
FORD offered to monitor our houses – said they would come in, film
all the walls and basement, and place monitors on any existing cracks
to measure if the construction caused any growth in them, and that
FORD would help us with this. Short erik looked annoyed. The more
tall erik (who was young and new to the project) talked, the more
short erik (who was older and seasoned ) got irritated. Tall erik was
out of bounds but did not know it. And he was giving away too much
information. They all left, and deb and i felt no comfort, no ease of
the panic we were diving into. We were very thankful to have tim and
diana stand up with us. But there was no hope. And not a damn thing
we could do about the situation.
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