Seventeen families from the Calvert Ridge subdivision in Elkridge, where several homes were evacuated last year because of a methane gas buildup, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against the neighborhood's builders and developers.
Ryan Homes and the Brantly Development Group are the main defendants named in the suit, which seeks $75 million in damages for lost wages, medical care, pain and suffering, and loss of the reasonable use of property.
Robert Coursey, a spokesman for Ryan Homes, did not return calls to his office and car phone yesterday.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, claims that the subdivision, north of Route 100 between Montgomery Road and Interstate 95, was built on a landfill and that the builders and developers misrepresented the property to the families that purchased homes there.
None of the plaintiffs was evacuated by Howard County officials, but the lawsuit contends that lead, solvents, landfill gases and petroleum hydrocarbons have been discovered at dangerous levels in soil samples taken from their lots.
Ryan Homes installed methane gas detectors in the houses, some of which sounded on several occasions and forced families to leave until fire officials declared their properties safe. The fire department has been called to the community at least once a month because of the alarms, but no toxic levels of fumes have been found, lawyers and residents say.
"In three to five years, it's going to get worse as the foundation settles and cracks," said Robert Brager, a lawyer representing the families. "The danger is something that accumulates over time. When [the garbage] decomposes, it turns into gas and the gas goes through the cracks."
In September, potentially explosive levels of methane in basements forced out three families in Calvert Ridge and briefly forced out a fourth family in a neighboring subdivision, Marshalee Woods.
Three months later, Ryan Homes dug up the back yard of one of the permanently displaced families and unearthed truck tires, lumber, a metal drum, a water heater and other debris buried years ago. Ryan Homes officials said tests indicated that the source of the methane was limited to the area behind that home and that they had no plans to excavate other areas of the subdivision.
Ryan Homes agreed in December to move four Calvert Ridge families to new homes in another subdivision, but their neighbors received no such offer. Three families in the subdivision of 24 homes are not part of the litigation.
"The issue is I cannot feel safe in the house with what we know and what we do not know," said Eric Muller, a Calvert Ridge resident. "Nobody knows what's down there, and that's the most dangerous kind of dump."
Pub Date: 3/27/99