Landslide crashes into country home near Henderson

June 26--HENDERSON -- It's clear Randy Carlson is trying to keep some perspective on the hillside that invaded his dining room eight days ago.

His family is fine. He wasn't even home at the time. And if you don't happen to look in one corner of the house, well, you can sort of put this whole messy business out of mind.

"It could be a lot worse," he said. "We're not the only ones in this mess."

That perspective helps Carlson cope -- he knows he hasn't been singled out for misfortune -- but he's still not looking forward to sleeping in the garage.

"Every time you walk in this room, you say 'This sucks,'" he said of the house's great room, an open space with a den, kitchen and dining room.

Carlson was supervising open gym at Belle Plaine High School on June 19 when he received a frantic call from his wife, Terry, at about 10 a.m.

She and their adult daughter Tanya were safe. But some unspecified catastrophe had befallen their house. "Gone" was how she put it on the phone.

Within the hour, he saw what she meant. By itself, the landslide wasn't any different from the dozens of others that dotted the ravine just north of Le Sueur after the downpour. As if excised by a scalpel, a chunk of dirt and trees had slipped and come to rest more or less intact.

Or at least it would have been intact, if the wall wasn't in the way. After crashing through a wall and submerging much of the deck, the mud has inched forward in the days since, but has mostly come to rest. Tanya marked the mud's advance in a red chalk outline, like a corpse on a sidewalk.

Carlson got another shock later that day -- insurance would not be covering any of the damage. As he has since learned in detail, virtually no insurance policy in the country covers landslides.

He's accepted it, but it still grates a bit.

"It's a shock because you expect your insurance to be there for you," he said.

Since then, experts have told him the house is in no danger of collapsing, and he planned to start removing mud Thursday afternoon. He has plenty of help; about 20 friends said they would bring chainsaws and a skid loader.

Carlson and his wife are Belle Plaine natives, and he's been teaching math at the high school for 28 years and coached the boys basketball team for 25 years. They have four grown children.

Ten years ago, the couple built this home to get into nature with turkeys and deer at their doorstep.

They had good reason to think nature wouldn't get into the home. After all, the trees on the hillside were many decades old. His neighbors tell him nothing like this has happened in living memory. Twelve inches of rain, he said, fell over 18 hours here.

"It was one of those things where something unlucky happened and we were the unlucky ones," he said.

But as Carlson has been telling himself for a week, he's not the only flood victim. In Sibley County alone, four homes have been damaged by landslides and their owners displaced. The Carlsons' home is about a mile east of the Minnesota River, putting them in Le Sueur County.

A choice

The family now faces a choice: repair the home, try to sell it or walk away and lose it to foreclosure.

It will cost between $100,000 and $200,000 to repair the home, a large chunk of which would be spent shoring up the hillside. Opinions vary on his risk for another slide, but he's been told that he'll need to stabilize the hill.

The family doesn't have that kind of money just sitting around, especially on top of their mortgage. And if they start spending money, Carlson knows the family needs to commit to staying.

In the short term, their plan is to haul out the mud, put up some plywood walls and get electricity and running water back. They're already taking baby steps -- electricity was restored to the garage over the last few days.

No matter what, he said, he knows one thing.

"We do need help."

Donations to the Carlson Relief Fund are being accepted at the State Bank of Belle Plaine, at 201 W. Main St., PO Box 87. To donate online, visit www.gofundme.com and search for "Randy and Terry Carlson."

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