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purchased a home that has an in ground pool, noticed the drains in the back yard and was assured they were for pool runoff/overflow. No right of ways were found and everything was great. Recently we discovered that the drains are connected to a large culvert pipe located underground and in fact I provide drainage for the ENTIRE neighborhood. There is no right of way or easement in place, and in fact no one has come to maintain or speak with us in all of the time that we have lived there. in April we noticed a pretty decent amount of erosion showing at the surface against the slab to our home......now my home is showing more and more damage. City wants us now to sign a right of way grant BUT in that paper with also includes a hold harmless agreement for any damages.....I'm not signing anything. Yesterday we had cable loc come out and the guy informed us that the rear of our home can collapse at any time....brick walls can be moved by pushing on them, sever cracking, and the rear of my home has dropped over an inch. The pipe apparently runs through the middle of my rear yard and no more then 4-5 ft from the actual rear of my home. I now have the "sinkhole" that a lot of you people have mentioned. I'm having a structural engineer come out Friday at 9 am. Homeowners doesn't cover ANY portion of this nor will they assist with relocation expenses if my home if found to be structurally unsound by this engineer. I have 4 kids in this house and the rear of the house has 2 of the 4 bedrooms and 1 bathroom located in it. Also there are gas lines that run through the rear of the home as well. We pulled all maps and legal documents (purchases, easements, right of ways) on our property and there is NOTHING there. Please some advice or suggestions.....The home that we worked so hard for and have put so much into is literally falling down around us and the city only seems to be worried about us signing this paper with a hold harmless agreement in it.
The county where I live put a drain pipe under the road in front of our house. They then dug out the yard to go back the length of our lot and behind houses on the another road. Initially this was all dug out for water flow. Now, 25+ years later it has pretty much all filled up with dirt from the drain-offs going into it. Consequently, my entire side yard floods whenever we have a good rain. Who is responsible for keeping this ditch clean and flowing?
Is there a right-a-way or easement there? If it provides drainage to the neighbors as well, i'm pretty sure that the city/county would have to maintain proper drainage. I know in my area they are to maintain as well.
purchased a home that has an in ground pool, noticed the drains in the back yard and was assured they were for pool runoff/overflow. No right of ways were found and everything was great. Recently we discovered that the drains are connected to a large culvert pipe located underground and in fact I provide drainage for the ENTIRE neighborhood. There is no right of way or easement in place, and in fact no one has come to maintain or speak with us in all of the time that we have lived there. in April we noticed a pretty decent amount of erosion showing at the surface against the slab to our home......now my home is showing more and more damage. City wants us now to sign a right of way grant BUT in that paper with also includes a hold harmless agreement for any damages.....I'm not signing anything. Yesterday we had cable loc come out and the guy informed us that the rear of our home can collapse at any time....brick walls can be moved by pushing on them, sever cracking, and the rear of my home has dropped over an inch. The pipe apparently runs through the middle of my rear yard and no more then 4-5 ft from the actual rear of my home. I now have the "sinkhole" that a lot of you people have mentioned. I'm having a structural engineer come out Friday at 9 am. Homeowners doesn't cover ANY portion of this nor will they assist with relocation expenses if my home if found to be structurally unsound by this engineer. I have 4 kids in this house and the rear of the house has 2 of the 4 bedrooms and 1 bathroom located in it. Also there are gas lines that run through the rear of the home as well. We pulled all maps and legal documents (purchases, easements, right of ways) on our property and there is NOTHING there. Please some advice or suggestions.....The home that we worked so hard for and have put so much into is literally falling down around us and the city only seems to be worried about us signing this paper with a hold harmless agreement in it.
What a nightmare. I am sorry for your trouble. Who assured you the drains were for pool runoff? The seller? Your real estate agent? Do you have any written statements about this? Do you remember inquiring during the due diligence period of purchase?
I am not an attorney but fear you may be far past the opportunity to seek damages. I recommend you contact a real estate attorney to investigate options, but fear there is nothing to blame but bad luck and poor research.
I hope there are remediation methods that a structural engineer can propose to help you. Do you think the pool is contributing to the problem?
OK folks...hold the phone. Let me try to sort out some myth here and maybe even try to help this guy out. I work smack dab in the middle of this field of discussion, so I can hopefully help. This is going to get lengthy, but it's needed to clear up some misconception here.
First and foremost...if you have an easement on your property (any type of easement: storm water, water line, sewer line, etc.), the entity that has rights to that easement (presumably the city, county, or state) MUST restore the property to as-good or better condition if they ever access the easement to work on their "thing" that's in the easement. As long as the property owner didn't violate the terms of the easement and build a permanent structure on it, there should be no permanent or drastic damage or changes to the owner's property (to the land or things on the land). Yes, sometimes contractors can leave the work area looking like crap, but a phone call gets the inspector out to verify that it is indeed crap, and it gets corrected. 99% of the time, it's done and over with, and you'd never know something was there.
Generally speaking, no permanent structure can be constructed on top of an easement: swimming pools, house additions, garages, etc. Non-permanent structures usually are allowed: decks, sheds, driveways, playgrounds, etc. However, if the easement is in place before a non-permanent structure (i.e. you buy a place with an easement but there's no non-permanent structure in place already), you'll more than likely have to be responsible for removing it and replacing it at your cost if access is ever needed to that item in the easement (as opposed to when they get an easement signed from you, you have bargaining power to make the entity move and replace the non-permanent structure at their cost since you're doing them a favor by granting the easement). You should be able to build permanent structures all the way up to the easement line. If the entity who created the easement did their job right, they left enough room within the easement to dig a hole and get to the "thing" buried in the easement without disturbing nearby structures. If this is not the case, you have the upper hand because they didn't figure the easement wide enough...and you go back to the negotiating table *IF* work ever needs to be done. Hope that makes sense...ask if not.
Remember, an easement *usually* is not much wider, if any wider at all, than the set back requirements for building on your lot anyway (usually anywhere from 5-15' in a newer residential neighborhood). These set backs are imposed by the local government and/or the HOA. That being said, you usually don't lose much, if any, build-able area in your lot from an easement. I'm not saying there aren't some easements that cut strange directions across a lot and do take a chunk out of your build-able footprint, but those are the exception...and the owner is usually well-compensated for having to live with that (in the form of payment if the easement is acquired later, or in a much lower sale price).
About the flood plane...
Here's the link to the FEMA FIRM (Flood Insurance Rate Map) website: FEMA Map Service Center -
If you are not a slightly technical person, this will be a confusing thing to look at. Basically, you enter your address in the top left (Flood Maps is the default search). The search will return all available maps for that address. Click the "view" button. This will open a new window and an interactive FIRM viewer. Now the hard part....zoom in and find where your house is. Some FIRM maps are old...10+ years or so...so your street may not be shown. You have to do a best guesstimate of where it is.
Or, for this specific case, use Union County's GIS website: http://maps.co.union.nc.us/gomaps/map/Index.cfm (nearly all urban counties in the US have these kinds of sites nowadays, just Google your county's "GIS" website). Search for the parcel of interest, turn on the layers called FEMA Zones 1994 and FEMA Preliminary to see if the FEMA flood zone touches your property.
IMPORTANT.......
These maps are not the tell-all, be-all for whether or not your property will "flood." These are FEMA maps...their sole purpose in life is to tell the insurance companies whether or not to gouge your rates! They represent the modeled or assumed 100-year flood elevation...meaning, you can *probably* expect to see water there once every 100 years. A typical stream or ditch can easily come out of it's banks in a heavy rain storm or prolonged rain event. An adjacent property and/or structure *could* be affected by this. It all depends 100% on the topography of the lot (how much it slopes up form the stream) and just how much water gets to that stream (how much development is in the area). A stream out in the country will have to deal with much less water than a stream running through uptown due to the amount of impervious (built on) surfaces not letting water get into the ground.
The only way to tell if a yard or house will flood is to have a professional make an assessment. If there is a stream behind or very near to the property and there is not a significant slope (on the order of 10-15 feet high) combined with a wide "valley" for the stream to flood into if it leaves it's banks, you can't really say it will never flood. It's not a given that it will flood either.
My house for example has a 20' elevation change from my foundation to the stream behind us. There's also a very wide area (a valley, or flood plane) accompanying the stream along it;s path through the woods. I can guarantee this house will never flood in any event short of catastrophic or biblical!
Without knowing much specific detail about the original poster's property, I can't make any judgment at all. If you'd like to send me the parcel address or parcel ID number, I'd be happy to take a look at the website ad give a very unofficial opinion of the flood potential.
I'm out of breath now form typing this and dead tired (just got in from a stream seminar in Asheville for the past 3 days, of all things!)...that's all for now. Feel free to post questions about this and I'll try to answer.
The main thing is to not run and hide from the word "easement."
Parcel ID 18-107-07022 City Atlanta, County Dekalb
I have a lot that is 55 x158. The back right on the plot says drainage survitude. I did not get the plot till after we closed on the lot. I have tried to google the meaning. To me, it is a low spot on my property. Can I just fill it in with dirt? I have to build up my lot to be even with the road anyway. The lot beside my is a non owner and is also low. The property two plots over was filled in and I think all the water came our way.
That is some very good information. I'm hoping to terminate by Quiet the Title or Necessity/Destroy the Reason for the Easement. I believe the topology has changed and I'm thinking that I will have to pay a surveyor to re-shoot the topology and provide me an elevation certificate. I'm not thrilled about emptying my wallet just to be able to put up my fence on my property line. I have 17 feet from my back porch to the back property line and the city is enforcing the easement, which will leave me with 7 feet. The ”Drainage Easement” is 30 feet wide. 10 feet on my property and 20 feet on the property (townhome) behind me. I have the original neighborhood plat and the sectional plat of the area that my house is located at. I'm new to this forum; is there a way for us to communicate direct message, so I can send the address and upload the plats?
As someone mentioned above, many properties have an easement of some sort and the owners aren't even aware of it. In most newer S/D's, there are water collection easements that run throughout the neighborhoods, as in our case. These are required in order for proper drainage. Without them there could be problems! We have a storm drain easement at the very back of our property that simply runs behind all the homes on our street and out between homes underground to the storm collection drains throughout the neighborhood. You would never know it's there. Again, as someone said, the only potential problem is where it is - like if it ran through the middle of your back yard. Probably over half the homes in the neighborhood have these storm water easements somewhere around their homes. It definitely does not mean that the homes are in a flood plain! You should always make sure your home is not in one, however. Again, in newer S/D's, particularly since Hurricane Katrina, there are very strict rules about not building in flood plains.
Hey steve we just bought house without knowing that there is drainage easement in our yard and evertime yard gets flooded due to rain. It tooks 2 to 3 days for water to go. What we can do in this case? Does city can help?
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Storm drain
