‘There’s a time bomb in your homes, neighbor’: Failed pipe floods SLO County house
Walking into Don Smith’s Trilogy at Monarch Dunes home, you wouldn’t know it had been fully furnished a little under a month ago.
Now, his 3,000-square-foot house in Nipomo is under complete internal demolition and renovation following a break in the water manifold, which controls the flow of hot and cold water in a residence.
Neither Smith nor his wife were home on July 6 when the leak started and their landscaper called them when water was seen leaking from the doors of the house.
An estimated 89% of the home’s floor plan was submerged in 2-3 inches of water when the manifold broke, dumping hundreds of gallons of water through the ceiling of the home’s primary bedroom.
Water seeped through the entire residence, damaging flooring and anything sitting or attached to the ground. All told, insurance estimates placed the cost to demolish the water-damaged parts of the building and possessions at somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000.
“There’s a time bomb in your homes, neighbor,” Smith said. “You better read this and get this taken care of.”
And it’s not the first time such a catastrophic failure has happened to a home at Trilogy, but developer Shea Homes says the number is very small compared to the overall number of homes and that the homes are also well out of warranty.
“I just wanted (developer Shea Homes) to tell me so this wouldn’t have happened — that’s all,” Don Smith said. “I think that’s a dereliction of duty on their part.”
Damage was ‘preventable’ if caught early
The Smiths contracted Servpro, a water and fire damage demolition and repair company, to handle the demolition of the home’s interior, which will likely take another four weeks to complete.
Travis Johnson, general manager of the company, said the damage may have been preventable had developer Shea Homes alerted Trilogy residents of the problem.
“Would it be preventable after one (case of manifold failure)? Probably not,” Johnson said. “After three? Most definitely.”
Johnson said the Smiths and their insurance company would have been saved hundreds of thousands of dollars had they been alerted to the problem before it happened.
“It’s more than just the dollar value of the house — it’s the massive inconvenience, the interruption of life, the loss of items that might not be replaceable,” Johnson said. “We’ve got a lot of things that were ruined and lost, but the most valuable thing in our life is time. How much time have they lost dealing with this?”
Don Smith said the cost to replace the home’s three manifolds with better plastic parts would have been around $1,500 had Shea Homes alerted the Smiths to the problem, which had occurred in several other homes in the development, according to posts on the Trilogy message board.
The two businesses the Smiths run from their home, which were based on marketing products to distributors like Amazon and Wayfair, were also disrupted by the demolition.
Other Trilogy homes flooded by same defective component
In the case of fellow Monarch Dunes residents Odell and Nora Lee, the damage was less severe but was caused by the same part: a broken water manifold.
The Lees’ primary bathroom manifold suffered a similar break, but they were able to stop the flow of water before more of their home was damaged.
“The ceiling fell down while we were away,” Odell Lee said. “Turns out (it) had been dripping for maybe a year, but no sign that (the ceiling) was getting wet, and it fell down and created a major problem for the house.”
It took a total of six weeks and $8,000 to demolish the damaged parts of the home and allow it to fully dry.
Like the Smiths, the Lees were also not notified of a potential problem by Shea Homes, though the Lees never sought any restitution from the developer as their home was out of warranty.
“They should have informed people that this is happening all over our development,” Lee said.
As many as eight other Monarch Dunes homes have been reported as having this manifold issue on the MyTrilogyLife bulletin website, according to Smith, though more may have gone unreported.
Shea Homes responds, does not take responsibility for damage
Because the Smiths’ home was far more damaged than the Lees’, they spent much of July living in VRBOs and rental properties before renting out another home in the Trilogy development, which Smith said does not have the same manifold problem.
When Smith reached out to Korey Carroll, the regional operations manager for Shea Homes who manages the Trilogy developments at Monarch Dunes and Rice Ranch, he denied Shea’s responsibility in the manifold defect.
“It is worth noting your home is well beyond the applicable limitations period found within Civil Code 896(e) (four years from original close of escrow),” Carroll said in an email with Smith. “Shea respectfully declines to accept any responsibility for your home as it is now more than 13.5 years past the provided warranty.”
Shea Homes representatives said because the homes that have experienced the issue are out of warranty, the developer does not think it is “appropriate” to warn other Monarch homeowners of the problem.
“When you consider there are more than 1,300 homes in the Monarch Dunes community built over the last 17 years, the problem does not appear to be widespread or systemic as Mr. Smith alludes,” a Shea Homes representative said.
Smith also said Carroll failed to provide examples of Shea notifying Monarch Dunes residents to the potential problem.
Shea responded by saying a 2018 Homeowner’s Association meeting on the subject “generated very little interest.”
Shea said the problem has occurred in less than half of 1 percent of the 1,300 homes in Monarch Dunes.
“We understand from your original email Mr. Smith believes ‘a couple of other homes’ also had a manifold-related leak,” the Shea representative said. “As far as we know, this appears to be accurate. … There have only been a couple of these leaks reported to Shea over the years, including Mr. Smith’s. In each case, the home was more than 10 years old at the time of the leak and significantly beyond Shea’s warranty.”
The Shea representative said Monarch Dunes homeowners are responsible for the maintenance and repair of their homes.
At this time, the Smiths are not planning on taking legal action against Shea Homes.
This story was originally published August 10, 2022 at 11:30 AM.
