When a landslide sent earth tumbling in Pittsburgh’s Spring Hill neighborhood, Randal Miller said, he figured he was lucky it didn’t knock down his house — it only affected his and a neighbor’s backyards. But the city condemned their properties anyway.
“We were all told we couldn't come back into our houses — that was 7 or 8 years ago,” he said. “There were points at which it seemed the city had intended to help, and then didn't.”
Miller says he and neighbors couldn’t afford the cost of remediating their properties, estimated up to $1 million, and homeowner’s insurance doesn’t typically cover damage from landslides. They couldn’t return to the properties. So, he moved.
“I still swing by that house every couple of weeks just to make sure it's fine,” he told WESA. “No additional earth movement has happened in all this time, so it does feel crazy at times that we can't reoccupy.”
To fix problems like Miller’s, Allegheny County House members Valerie Gaydos (R-Moon) and Emily Kinkead (D-Pittsburgh) want the state to offer insurance that covers homeowners and municipalities affected by landslides.
Other states have taken similar measures because nationwide landslide insurance “is very rarely — if ever — offered” with traditional homeowner policies, said Chad Marzen, professor of business law at Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business. No insurance carrier offers coverage here in Pennsylvania, he added.
That’s one reason why Kinkead says Harrisburg needs to step in.
“This is sort of what government is supposed to do,” Kinkead said, “where the private industries are not stepping up to do something that people need help with, that's where the government should step in.
“States like California have passed requirements for commercial insurance to provide landslide coverage,” she added. “But what you're seeing is that instead of providing landslide coverage, commercial insurers are actually just pulling out of the market [there] entirely.”
The lawmakers said local municipalities don’t have money set aside to help homeowners fix damage from earth movement — or even to help clear their own roads. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t have a landslide program — only a flood-protection that responds to mudslides.
“Local municipalities just can't afford the amounts of money that it takes to move a lot of this dirt,” Gaydos said. “This would give them at least some protection to get them over the hump.”
The problem is especially pressing in the Pittsburgh region, thanks to a combination of sloping terrain and silty soil types. (An Allegheny County dashboard shows where past landslides occurred, plus the dozens of areas susceptible to the hazards. As WESA has previously reported, climate change is likely to bring extreme rainfalls that are expected to make the problem worse.)
“If you look at a soil map, the southwest has particular impacts,” said Jason Davidek, executive director of the Allegheny League of Municipalities. The group is backing the bill because “We were supportive of some kind of solution to find relief.”
The model for Gaydos and Kinkead's proposal is the state Department of Environmental Protection’s mine subsidence program, which covers about 60,000 structures and has been around since 1961. “It's paid out approximately $40 million thus far,” said Marzen, of Penn State. Kinkead and Gaydos’ proposal would put $10 million to the landslide insurance fund to start out.
Gaydos and Kinkead introduced a similar measure last session, but it gained little ground: Despite having some bipartisan support, it didn’t make it to the Senate.
The two lawmakers hope to improve prospects this year by expanding the insurance to cover sinkholes, a more widespread problem throughout the state.
There is a precedent for such a program, said Marzen.
Due to the soil and rock that easily dissolves in water, “The state of Florida, in their insurance policies, they all are required to offer some type of either sinkhole coverage or catastrophic ground collapse,” Marzen said. And Pennsylvania, he added, trails only the Sunshine State in its abundance of sinkholes.
