Maggie Valley mudslide lands in court

Chiefly, they fault two sets of engineers and graders behind an extensive retaining wall that snaked a few hundred feet across the face of the mountain above their home. The suit claims the retaining wall was subpar and its collapse is what triggered the landslide and further, that the risk of the retaining walls failure was known but not revealed.

A year before the slide, this thing was showing signs of failure, Attorney Matthew Roberson, who is representing the couple, said in court Monday. You have Buck Mountain getting bored out by a massive landslide and our clients house being struck by a massive wall of mud as a result.

In addition to blaming the engineers and graders who built the wall, the suit names Ghost Town in the Sky, a mountaintop amusement park with chronic slope stability problems over the decades.

The suit accuses Steve Shiver, the former manager of Ghost Town in the Sky, of being inattentive at best to the threat posed by the strained retaining wall and at worst, intentionally turning a blind eye to the looming risk to downslope neighbors.

Meanwhile, the engineers and builders behind the wall claim theres no way to know what caused the landslide.

The problem with this case is this whole mountain came down, Bill Jones, an attorney for engineer Verlin Edwards, said in court Monday.

Jones proffered a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Did the landslide knock out the wall, or the wall fall and cause the landslide?

Did it start at the wall? Did it start below the wall? To testify on the cause of the failure would be speculation and conjecture, Jones said.

Such a deep bench of people being sued six individuals in all means a lot of lawyers in the kitchen. There were so many lawyers trying to pack in behind the defendants table this week, they couldnt all fit.

At the start of proceedings Monday, three of them took off down the hallway and returned a moment later, each wheeling an extra chair. Once they were settled, a row of seven lawyers snaked around the defendants table and along the wall, with boxes and giant binders of case files and exhibits mounded around them.

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Maggie Valley mudslide lands in court