By Taylor Boyd
The Wolf Creek Lane community in Ararat is in desperate need of help as its road is close to being destroyed due to rain damage.
Jill Terry, community resident, said the issues began during Hurricane Nicholas in mid-September when the storm rains were hitting the area.
“It’s a private road,” she said, and added the community is having a difficult time getting help from the county or the state are refusing to do anything to help us. The last rain that we had dropped like seven inches of rain right here, and it’s almost completely washed the road out,” she said.
Now, “there’s just no way to safely get out or in,” she said. “For us, it’s life-or-death. When the road caves in the rest of the way, how are we going to get saved” in the event of an emergency?
When driving into the community, a large hole in the right-hand side of the road hidden is partially behind a sign warning of the danger.
While the left-hand side is still navigable, a sink hole has developed inches away from the edge of the road, and that could potentially lead to another large hole in the road, or the road collapsing altogether, Terry said.
Large and minute cracks also have recently developed near the center of the road. Terry said residents have noted that the road seems to move, or give a little, when driving over it.
The area consists of about three inches of asphalt concrete on top of dirt. It is hollow underneath the layer of dirt, and a large, rusted pipe going across the road is visible. The pipe has multiple tears, with some areas looking almost dented.
Terry said a contractor who does road repair recently came to examine the road. “He said, ‘well one of you guys is going to go in. You shouldn’t be driving over it at all, and there’s nothing holding the road up.’”
Terry said the road is the community’s only way in and out, and many of its handicap and elderly population cannot walk up and down it due to the steepness.
“Right now, I have a handicap child that I’m putting in a four-wheeler to get her up and down the road,” she said.
Because of the unsafe conditions, some of the residents are parking their vehicles before they reach the caved-in portion and then walking across the damaged area to get into another vehicle and drive the rest of the way to their homes. The hope it those extra steps also will lessen the added damage to the road, while ensuring access to the main road is maintained.
Terry and others recently put a large yellow sign up before the hole to warn drivers of the hole. Terry said Jerri Webb, of the Ararat area, had discussed the situation with a lawyer.
Terry said she was told that Webb’s “attorney had said that if we didn’t put the sign down here” drivers that got injured because of the damaged road “could sue all of us.”
Another person told her that insurance companies likely would say “if you know about the road and it’s getting ready to cave in and you’re driving over it and fall in, that you likely won’t be covered because you knew it could happen,” she added.
Terry said the road cannot be traversed by emergency vehicles due to its condition.
Susan Rosasco, also a resident, said the road has been fixed at least three times since she and her husband, Robert, moved to the area in 2009.
“It stinks up here for those that are disabled. What if we have a seizure, stroke, (or) what if our houses catch on fire? We’re scared to death to live in our own houses,” she said.
The closest house is more than 1,000 feet away, and the furthest is about half-a-mile away, from the damaged section, Terry said.
Once the road completely washes away, Terry said people will have to walk down into a ditch that has a creek running through it.
Delivery drivers also stopped delivering to the community because of the damaged road, according to Terry.
“My 10-year-old daughter is wheelchair bound with a feeding tube and has epilepsy,” she said, and added the delivery service “is refusing to deliver her medicine, and we don’t have another place they can deliver them to.”
To ensure their trash is picked up, residents moved a dumpster down the road, placing it in-front of the caving in area, Terry said, adding that the community also is waiting for the hole to affect the nearby telephone pole.
“We kind of keep waiting for that to fall because it’s dug out a lot of ground. We don’t know how far it’s down, but it’s taken out three or four feet of dirt that was around it,” she said, adding the lines are stretched to the max because of how the dirt shifted.
Michael Petty, a resident, said another telephone line went down because of damages to the road area. “My phone doesn’t work at all. I don’t have anything,” he said.
Terry said she recently talked to Jane Fulk, the Dan River District representative on the Patrick County Board of Supervisors. She said she was told the Blue Ridge Rescue Squad has an all-terrain type vehicle (ATV) that could possibly be used to access the community and transport patients down to the road.
But Terry said she does not believe that will be a possibility for much longer because she was told by a contractor that future heavy rainfall will more than likely wash away the remaining part of the road. “There’s going to be a huge drop off. There’s no way to even get across with a mule (ATV) or anything else” if the road is completely destroyed, she said.
Fulk said the county is currently looking for solutions to help the residents and is trying to find grants to help.
“The problem is we don’t have road funds. The county doesn’t collect anything for roads, that’s all the state,” she said.
The community, which includes 15 house and more than 30 residents, pay taxes in Patrick County. Some of the residents have lived in the community for more than 20 years.
“We’ve never asked for help from the county. We have funded all the repairs of this road ourselves for many years. The last two times the road has caved in on that side I’ve paid for it out of my own pocket,” Terry said.
She added that she has paid more than $3,000 to fix the road while the community spent almost $10,000 repairing the road over the last few years.
Fulk said she has talked to West Piedmont Health District (WPHD), Soil & Water Conservation, other departments and state legislators about the issue, while County Administrator Geri Hazelwood has contacted the Patrick County Department of Social Services, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The road is also currently not in the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) state system of public roads. Because it’s a private road, the landowners must maintain the road’s conditions.
Fulk said she also has tried to get VDOT to take the road into its system, but “the landowners have to bring their road up to state standards, and then they apply to have it adopted into the state system. It’s up to the state whether they take it in or not, even if they get it up to state standards,” she said.
“So, they want us to raise $29,000 in order to build it to their specifications but they’re not guaranteeing they’ll take it,” Terry said, frustrated. “We have put money into the road, quite a bit, but it’s Band Aid because we can’t afford to fix it.
“We can’t afford it at this point, and it’s coming down to a life-or-death situation of we’re not going to be able to get in or out. If there’s an emergency, what are we going to do,” she asked.
Terry started a GoFundMe to help raise funds to repair the road. It can be found by going to gofundme.com and searching for “Wolf Creek Lane road culvert repair.”
