- Draper, Utah, officials demanded that two households overlooking a canyon be evacuated in October, KSTU reports.
- Residents saw their homes slide off the cliff and into the canyon below on Saturday morning.
- Eric Kamradt wrote that he and his wife were still paying the $900,000 house mortgage as they stayed in a rental property awaiting repairs.
A Utah couple saw their forever home slide off its foundation into a canyon in a cave-in they had been warned about months before.
On Saturday, Draper’s Eric Kamradt and his wife watched as their home and another uninhabited home slipped into the canyon, the once neglected structures. According to KSTU, several residents of their neighborhood evacuated surrounding homes at the request of city officials.
Kamradt documented the destruction of the $900,000 home he bought with his wife in November 2021 and shared the clip on LinkedIn.
“Everyone’s got problems. Here’s ours, because it was meant to be our forever home,” the grim caption read.
The couple had to vacate their future forever home in October 2022 when the city revoked their occupancy permit and the permit for a nearby home that housed a family of seven, according to a December outlet report from the same year.
In the report, Kamradt pointed out that visible cracks in the house’s foundation began to appear when the area closest to the canyon began to sink in December. At the time, the couple lived in a rental until the structural problems were resolved.
Draper government officials took to the city’s Facebook account on Saturday to issue a statement about the matter and to close trails near the Hidden Canyon Estates subdivision where the homes were located. The city is located approximately 19 miles outside of Salt Lake City.
“Draper City has been following for months with the developer, Edge Homes, the engineering studies that Edge Homes has conducted regarding the stability of the surrounding area,” the statement read.
He continued, “As the snowpack melts and conditions create changes, other homes in the neighborhood will be assessed for safety reasons. At this time, only the two adjacent homes are being evacuated.”
City officials ended their statement by saying “everyone is safe” after the incident.
Kamradt and Edge Homes did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Kamradt shared more about his experience with Edge Homes in the comments section of his LinkedIn post.
“Edge Homes is playing hardball. We pay both the mortgage and the rent. They want us to make concessions before we pay the rent,” Kamradt wrote to another user Sunday morning.
In KSTU’s December report, Kamradt told reporters that Edge Homes offered the option of selling the house back to the agency or “moving somewhere else while they fix the house.”
A company spokesperson told the station that the changes to the homes were due to “unique geographic features and the soils on which they were built.”
