As the homeless, but highly popular National Architecture Columnist for the “Examiner,” I wrote a series of eyewitness articles on the long time tradition in the North Carolina Mountains of building homes and commercial buildings in flood plains. Even more incredulous was the policy of North Carolina Mountain county officials of issuing building permits for homes on slopes that were known to have catastrophic land slides or on the very same lots, where buildings had been washed away by floods.
Every spent hurricane or tropical storm that reached the North Carolina Mountains produced a new round of drownings in mobile home parks and expensive new houses sliding down mountainsides. The myth currently being told by TV newscasters that hurricane-related flooding had never happened before, is just that , , , a myth.
by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & Planner
On Friday, December 19, 2009 I emailed an application to be a local reporter for the new online news service . . . The Examiner. Meanwhile, I continued work on the design of a regional championship facility for amateur baseball teams. It was going to be my ticket to pay off my short-term debts, while 85% of the architects in Georgia were unemployed, because of the Great Recession. I was scheduled to close on a FannieMae mitigation loan in mid-January.
At the same day, a female attorney for McCalla-Raymer, LLC Attorneys filed illegal papers at the Pickens County, GA courthouse on behalf of FannieMae to have me evicted on Christmas Eve. Home occupants, scheduled for eviction were supposed to be given 30 days notice and Fannie-Mae had announced publicly a cessation of foreclosures and evictions during the holidays.
I received the eviction notice on Monday morning, December 21. In the chaos of packing all my belongings in a 2600 sq. ft. house then moving them to a rental storage in three days, I forgot to withdraw my application to the Examiner or tell any of my friends what had happened. Then in late February 2010, I read an email at a county library computer that I had been selected as the National Architecture Columnist for the Examiner. During the five years that I wrote for the Examiner, I never told them that I was homeless! LOL
While moving from National Forest campsite to National Forest campsite every two weeks, I observed much evidence of flood damage in western North Carolina. Earlier in my life, I had lived in the Asheville Area for a decade, but never really looked closely at the chronic problems with flood and landslide damage during that period. I documented those experiences after settling into an abandoned chicken house that autumn near Track Rock Gap, Georgia.
I thought the drafts of those early Examiner articles were lost, when ground lightning thoroughly barbecued my body and my computer five years ago. However, I found a CD with copies of the Examiner articles this morning. They include correspondence from North Carolina families, whose homes had slid off of mountains. The articles will be shared with you this coming week.
What about the baseball park?
The design and construction drawings were completed at the Valkyrie Video Games Parlor in Robbinsville, NC. I rented a booth and plugged in my CADD computer. On the way to my first campsite, I rented a mail box at the Blairsville, GA Post Office. That became the legal address for my architecture practice for the next two years.
Ironically, the baseball park was named after the father of Anne Cowan, a lady I dated from mid-1999 to mid-2000, when Susan was overseas a lot chasing terrorists. Susan insisted that I be seen with other women so that nosy rightwing-extremist cops in Georgia wouldn’t guess that we had been an “item” since the summer of 1991 in Virginia.
The Americas Revealed 