An old well springs to life and Santa Clara homeowners’ nightmare begins

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SANTA CLARA — Doug Ridley and Sherry Shen figured their condominium in Santa Clara would serve as a retirement nest egg, drawing enough rental income so they could comfortably travel to the United Kingdom and Asia visiting relatives.

Instead, the last two years have turned into a homeowner’s nightmare, thanks to an old artesian well — one of many that used to irrigate the orchards and farms of what was once dubbed the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

It all started in April 2018 when their tenants spotted a reflection in a floor grate from several inches of water that had accumulated in the crawlspace. Mold and musty odors came next, then eventually the ground beneath the crawl space directly under the living room collapsed into a large sinkhole.

What followed was a protracted battle with their homeowners association — which didn’t believe the source of the problem could possibly be an old abandoned well — and thousands of their savings poured into consultant and legal fees.

Meanwhile, they’re still pumping water out from under their home — enough of it to fill a swimming pool every few days.

Water reappears every time after it’s pumped out, Ridley said, and a plumber confirmed the source had nothing to with a leaky pipe.

“We discovered that a number of artesian wells in Santa Clara County had come back to life, and it seemed probable,” he added.

Their Santa Clara condominium is one of more than 100 built in the Rancho Palma Grande complex in the 1980s. Beneath the surrounding neighborhoods are dozens of old wells, drilled long before anybody properly documented them. While many such wells in the Santa Clara Valley were destroyed before the area urbanized into strip malls, tech campuses and subdivisions, not all were.

But the Rancho Palma Grande Homeowners Association was not interested in their theory, Ridley and Shen said. Instead, the HOA proposed a system for draining the water and prohibited them from entering the crawlspace or searching for a well. “We’ve shared information from our experts, but we’ve been refused permission to even work in the crawlspace, even at our expense,” Ridley said.

So for more than a year, the crawlspace kept filling up with muddy water, rotting the wood trim, producing mold that has spread throughout the home and spawning mosquitoes, insects and fungi. Over all that time, at the HOA’s suggestion, the water has been pumped through pipes onto a patch of ivy and trees in the complex.

Engineers hired by the couple estimated last week that 17,280 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — flows out of the well every day.

Despite those conditions, documented by engineers hired by the couple, the association’s vice president, Steven Moritz, wrote a letter in January 2019 that said “no mold or hazardous materials has been found in or under the unit” and asserted the association is “not aware of any conditions which would prevent you from renting your unit to a tenant.”

Then four months ago, the ground beneath the crawl space caved in, creating a large muddy sinkhole. In October, a year after the last tenants had moved out, the city of Santa Clara declared the condo unfit for habitation.

“We started out with a water problem, and after eight months of neglect we had a mold problem, and after a year, we now have a structural problem,” Ridley said.

As recently as August 2019, the HOA maintained that its historical records “[do] not indicate the existence of a well” and its consultants “have advised that the most likely source of the water is a high ground water table and not an unknown abandoned well,” according to an email from HOA attorney John Hill.

The email goes on to say excavation in search of a well would be be impractical and require destroying portions of the unit. So it forbade the couple from doing “any testing or exploration of the crawl space owned by the HOA.”

It wasn’t until Jan. 15 that the association began excavating the area around the hole, digging at least six feet beneath the sinkhole to reveal the cap of an old well, according to Terry O’Hara, the couple’s attorney.

But the damage had already been done. Besides mold, the water caused cracks in the foundation, according to the couple, who have sued the HOA for negligence and failing to maintain the property.

Moritz and Hill declined to answer questions or talk about the situation, citing a policy of not commenting on litigation.

Michael Duffy, a wells and water measurement manager at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, said he advised both the couple and HOA early on that an artesian well likely was at fault, not leaky pipes or the city’s water system.

Although the water district doesn’t own or control old wells, Duffy offered his advice after Ridley contacted his office.

The bubbling water was one clue that a well was at play, he said, because gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are trapped in the groundwater basin from decomposing organic matter. Excavating the area around the sinkhole should have been the next step to find the source of the water, he said.

“In this case, that’s not what happened for quite a while, even though we were recommending that,” Duffy said. “They finally started excavating because of the sinkhole, or rather, the water basin did the excavating for them.”

O’Hara, the couple’s attorney, said they believe the well was never destroyed and a steel cap that had been welded on top rusted off.

It’s difficult to tell where others like it remain because many were dug before Valley Water began registering them in the 1960s and before government agencies developed standards for properly destroying them, Duffy said.

“A lot of them got developed over, for lack of a better term, and they’re under freeways, office buildings and residences,” Duffy said.

The recent wet winters and drop in groundwater pumping led to a replenishment of aquifers, which increased water pressure and is causing old uncapped wells to start flowing again, Duffy said.

A map of wells maintained by Valley Water shows the approximate location of an abandoned one near Stone Pine Court in Santa Clara, where the condo is located. It was dug in the 1930s and registered in the 1960s, according to the agency’s records.

The couple has spent at least $100,000 on attorney’s fees and hiring engineers and experts to run tests. They haven’t been able to rent out the condo since October 2018.

“This has dramatically altered our retirement strategy,” Ridley said.

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“We expected the homeowners association to stand behind us,” Ridley said. “But of the 100 units (in the association), everyone owns the problem, and at some point, there will be a levy and people will find a bill in their dues, and I hate to do that to our neighbors.”

The expenses could have been avoided if the HOA had looked for the well a lot sooner, Shen said.

“We never blamed anybody for this – this is a weird thing,” she said, adding that nobody could have predicted the well would come back to life. “But this is all unnecessary. This could have been avoided.”

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