More then 10 years ago, Heinz Loelke started having problems with his home: cracks, a corner sinking, the front door sometimes not opening properly.

At one point, the living-room double-paned window started leaking because it was no longer sealed properly.

He had to replace it — and found a two-by-four stud was cracked.

Loelke, 88, who has been living in his home for 41 years with his wife Edith, found himself facing a disturbing problem, along with 750 other homeowners in west Quesnel.

The homes had been built on an ancient landslide, and the land had begun to slip.

The damage to Loelke’s home — which has cost him about $2,000 out of his own pocket — has been caused by slippage of about seven millimetres a year.

Some areas slip 10 to 15 millimetres a year.

“You don’t see (the movement). But the water lines break, the sewer lines break, so the city a couple of times a year is fixing them,” Loelke said.

While his home insurance payments are normal, he said he can’t get a straight answer whether his coverage would pay for damage caused by the land sliding.

There is no data for landslide or land-slippage insurance claims in British Columbia, said Steve Kee, a spokesman for the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

But he noted landslides and land slippage are typically not covered in homeowner policies.

Loelke said house prices in west Quesnel have definitely dropped because of the land-sliding problem, noting there’s also a moratorium on new construction.

West Quesnel is not the only area in the province where homes have been damaged because they are built on a slow-moving ancient landslide.

In 2009, the City of Chilliwack announced it would spend $18 million to purchase as many as 42 homes sitting on a 4,000-year-old landslide slowly moving down a mountain.

Kamloops has also experienced land slippage that has caused cracks in roadways and affected homes in the Aberdeen neighbourhood.

University of B.C. professor Erik Eberhardt said there are modern tools — using laser technology to take images from a plane — that can pinpoint these ancient landslides. But he noted it has not been used to provide provincial slide hazard mapping data.

“What happens is we build on these (ancient slides), we change the land use in terms of the way the slopes are draining or the amount of water coming into the slopes, the amount of trees, and all of a sudden they start moving,” explained Eberhardt, director of geological engineering at UBC.

He noted that countries such as Hong Kong or Switzerland put a lot of resources into wide-scale regional hazard mapping, but in B.C. any landslide hazard investigation takes place on a project by project basis.

Several ministries, including Environment and Forests and Lands, said the province does not track landslide hazard areas, contending that’s the responsibility of municipal or regional governments.

In Quesnel, the land-slippage issue came to public attention in 1997 when a natural gas explosion demolished two businesses, killed six people and injured 20. At the time, at least one city worker believed a natural gas line was ruptured by natural movement of the earth, but others disputed the idea.

In Quesnel, $4.7 million is being spent to reduce land movement by pumping underground water out of the west Quesnel area using pumping wells and drains. An update on the project — funded by the federal, provincial and Quesnel municipal governments — was scheduled to be presented in Quesnel Thursday night.

Quesnel mayor Mary Sjostrom said while they will never solve the problem completely, the idea is to slow it down.

“It’s huge for us. It’s a very large portion of our city and involves an elementary school. And lots of folks, like so many people, their entire livelihood is wrapped up in their homes,” she noted.

With files from Tiffany Crawford

ghoekstra@vancouversun.com