From the home she’s owned on Azalea Drive since 2017, Casey Gioeli watched the trucks roll in and the trees come down.
Several weeks earlier, Stanley Martin Homes began construction on Azalea Springs: 45 new Fry’s Spring homes squeezed into a steep, thickly forested 7.6-acre ravine between Azalea Drive and Monte Vista Avenue. “Towards the latter part of the afternoon [on Saturday, August 1], I noticed that they started to dig a small depression at the end of the property,” says Gioeli, a semi-retired physical therapist.
On August 2, “the rains began,” Gioeli recalls. “Azalea Drive drained just as it has always, and because the area had been denuded, the water … quickly overwhelmed what they had constructed in [the] short term, and sediment flowed downstream.”…