KEENE -- When the low rumble of his refrigerator's ice maker in the night snaps him out of fitful sleep, Jim Marlatt initially fears he and Charity, his wife of 40 years, have lost the race to save their home.

So far, a slow-moving landslide that has 82 acres of forest, boulders and earth coming down the slope of Porter Mountain in the Adirondacks has spared the Marlatts' dream home. But as earth continues to fall away around the edge of the house, there is now 15 feet of open air between their bedroom and the ground below.

For now, two massive steel I-beams slipped in Wednesday atop the foundation are safeguarding the house, as the couple -- now sleeping on padded benches next to their fireplace, which is on still-solid ground -- make plans to lift the house and move it away from the growing precipice.

"I have been able to sleep better since those I-beams went in," said Charity. "This house is our retirement. We have to save this house."

It was 2003 when the Marlatts moved into the house on Adrian's Acres Lane, with its dramatic views across the valley to Giant Mountain, its sides visibly scarred with bare rock from long-ago landslides. Now the Marlatts and a handful of other homeowners, who live the hamlet of Keene Valley about a mile off Route 74, are finding themselves part of the largest landslide in the state's modern history.

The first clue that someone was wrong came May 6, after the Marlatts returned from a family visit to California. While they were gone, a carpenter had added a laundry room near their bedroom, and Jim noticed the bedroom door would no longer shut properly. Then Charity saw a tree outside their bedroom window was tilting at a weird angle and a crack in the ground near a place under the deck where she kept gardening equipment.

In geological terms, the Marlatt home now rests on the lip of a "scarp," which is an edge where land is sliding away, said Andrew Kozlowski, an associate state geologist at the State Museum and director of the state Geologic Mapping Program.

The slide was triggered by water saturating the ground, which is composed of rocks, sand and lakebottom sediments left behind about 12,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, when the area was a glacier-fed lake called Lake Chapel.

This spring's melting of heavy snows in the mountains, coupled with heavy spring rains, turned these sands and sediments into a semi-fluid mixture like pancake batter, said Kozlowski. And that mixture is now moving downhill from a scarp that zig-zags about eight-tenths of a mile through the woods.

So far, the earth has slid up to 30 feet in some places, as the ground breaks away, like a line of books that tip over, one after another, he said. Weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, the slide continues about a half-mile down the mountain, covering about 300 feet of vertical drop and ending in what is called a toe.

"It is now moving a foot or two a day, which geologically speaking, is screaming fast. We don't know how long this will continue or how far back it might go," said Kozlowski. "It could stop in a few weeks. Or it could keep moving for be three months. Or three years. We just can't tell. It has to reach a new equilibrium."

He said the pace of movement slowed a bit after trees begin leafing out and drawing more water out of the soil. But more rain over last weekend caused the slide's pace to quicken this week. And the forecast for the next 10 days calls for a mix of rain and sun.

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"Sun and more leaves, sun and leaves are what we need," said Charity. "The rain is our enemy." The couple has already emptied their home and now is arranging for a house mover to carry the home back from the slide to a portion of their property that is currently stable and could possibly be anchored to bedrock.

But the bill for such a move could run $150,000 or more, and the couple just learned their insurance carrier, New York Central Mutual, won't cover the expense. "We just got denied over the phone, and an adjuster did not even come up here," said Jim, a retired business executive. The couple used to live in the San Francisco bay area, where they carried earthquake insurance.

Tim Trueworthy, a senior vice president for claims at New York Central Mutual, said homeowners policies typically do not cover landslides. He said the situation was "unfortunate."

The couple hopes the area gets declared a federal disaster area, which could make them eligible for federal assistance.

It is already too late for neighbors up the road, the Macholds. There, the ground has shifted so much that part of the driveway has collapsed, and the house is tilting apart from its foundation.

The home and the 4.1-acre property is a total loss, said Pam Machold, a resident of Princeton, N.J., as she stood next to a two-foot drop at the head of her driveway. The family has owned the home since 1988, and used it to host group outings their son and other children with autism.

"We had just passed ownership of the house to our children. It was going to be their legacy," she said.

They were in New Jersey when a caretaker noticed the landslide starting. So the caretaker and another friend hurriedly packed up the personal possessions. It was a prescient move, as by the time the Macholds arrived on Friday, the home had been condemned as unsafe to enter by the town.

Still, she walked through, one last time, with the stairs and railings as weird, vertigo-inducing angles. "It felt like the Titanic, just before the boat went down," she said.

Like the Marlatts, there is no insurance coverage for the Macholds. "We have been paying premiums for more than 20 years. At least we have our primary home to live in. But this property is essentially destroyed."

At this point, Pam wonders if the property could be donated to a conservation group, so geologists can study the landslide.

Kozlowski said it would have been very difficult for home builders to have determined the landslide risk there before the first homes went in about 25 years ago. "Maybe a trained geologist could have done a survey, but the average developers would not have been able to know," he said.

No one knows how many other landslide risk areas might be elsewhere throughout the mountainsides of the Adirondacks. Kozlowski added. He said that the area has never been mapped with aerial LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), an optical sensing system that can measures topography beneath thick forest.

"There could be hundreds of areas like this that could be investigated. If we knew about it in advance, it could help decide where people might not want to build in the first place."

Reach Nearing at 454-5094 or bnearing@timesunion.com