One beach cabin was destroyed and another damaged in a mudslide in Old Clinton this past weekend.
The slide happened at about 2:30 p.m. Sunday on Campers Row Walk, a walk-in shoreline community accessed off Hastings and South Brighton Beach roads. No one was injured, but the event was witnessed by at least two people and heard by several others.
“The home just exploded,” said Kathy Schwenn, a resident who saw the mudslide happen.
The hillside behind the home had been having problems for a couple weeks, and Schwenn and a friend, Suzie Hong, decided to survey the damage from the tide flats. They were nearing the area when the bluff suddenly gave way. The friends watched in horror as the home was obliterated by what Schwenn described as a “horrendous tidal wave of mud” roaring down the hill.
“We were just shaking in our boots,” Schwenn said. “It’s just unbelievable.”
Judi Sladky, who lives a few houses down, was nearby at the time but only heard the event take place. She was in her house and felt the ground begin to shake. While initially confused about just what was happening, a peek outside made everything clear.
“I looked out the window and saw the power lines moving and I knew,” she said.
The destroyed cabin was a one-story structure owned by Greg Cox, and the neighboring house, a two-story building, is owned by the Wood family. It was also damaged, but remains standing. Neither of the buildings were occupied at the time.
Cox declined to be interviewed by The Record Monday morning for this story.
Frances Wood, who owns her cabin with her siblings, said the mudslide appeared to be the conclusion of what was a two-week-long event. The trouble began shortly after the Dec. 12 windstorm that wreaked havoc across the South End when a heavy soup of clay and mud began collecting behind Cox’s house. About a week ago, it started flowing onto the Woods’ lot and at some point broke through into their house and covered portions of the floor with up to eight inches of mud, she said.
Wood and fellow family members spent several days digging out the house and had just finished up Saturday and left town when she was alerted to the disaster. She said she was stunned to hear about the destruction.
“This is more than anyone could have imagined,” Wood said. “It’s just heartbreaking.”
She also expressed gratitude that she had to leave town the day before, otherwise it’s likely they would have been there still working to clean up.
Jeff Bakeman, another neighbor and longtime friend of the Cox family, said a large maple tree on the bluff behind the homes came down during or right after the windstorm and appeared to have unsettled the hillside. Bakeman, who helped Cox remodel the small cabin about 25 years ago, said the buildup and runoff seemed “dicey” and that they decided to let it be, which proved a wise decision. Had people been working in the area they could have been seriously hurt or killed.
“I’m real happy no one was caught in it,” he said.
Muddy runoff from the hill is a headache in the community, but this particular area has been especially problematic, he said. Bakeman and Wood confirmed an adjacent and empty lot next to Cox’s house used to be home to a small cabin, but it was destroyed by a landslide about 20 years ago.
Despite the problems, no one is planning on picking up roots. The Wood family has had their cabin for nearly a century, and it’s become a generational treasure marked with tradition.
“We’ll go on loving that beach,” she said. “It will take a different form, we just don’t know what that is yet.”
Sladky said the past few weeks have been “unnerving” but she doesn’t feel unsafe in her home, which is only a few houses down from the Woods’. This is an old community, with some cabins being 100 years old, so events are rare, she said.
“You feel the pain; we’re all neighbors. … We’re family,” she said.
Schwenn agreed, saying as frightening as the mudslide was, she has no plans to leave as there is no place like Old Clinton in the summertime.
“Yeah, it gives us a bit of concern, but it’s still our piece of heaven,” Schwenn said.
