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Inman
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Home on the bombing range
Military history still haunts development site
Tuesday,
June 15, 2004
By Glenn Roberts Jr.
Mark
23 practice bombs, like the one shown here, have reportedly been
recovered from the site of the Southridge Hills residential
development in
Arlington
,
Texas
.
Source:
U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers.
Southridge
Hills, a 127-acre housing development in southeast
Arlington
,
Texas
,
features 10 floor plans, prices ranging from $108,000 to $135,000, and
a nearby golf course and lake. But Southridge Hills, built by KB
Home, is not your typical residential project.
The
housing development site was formerly home to a U.S. Naval Air Station
bombing range, and the decades-old legacy of its military use has
resurfaced in the form of controversy, lawsuits and a large-scale
cleanup project.
While
one KB Home Web
site promotes "spacious floor plans" and
"easy access to highways," a separate
KB Home Web site describes ongoing cleanup efforts
at the site. Information
at that site states, "KB Home continues to strongly believe that
this property is appropriate for community living," but also
cautions, "Southridge residents who find what they think is
ordnance should simply leave it alone and call 911."
The
development area was once known as Five
Points Field Outlying Field, a training ground for
military pilots during the 1940s that included a practice bombing
range. KB, after meeting with the Army Corps of
Engineers in 1998, acquired the property and began to build and sell
homes at the site in 2000. In addition to building homes in Texas, KB
home also has operations in California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico,
Colorado, Illinois, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.
The
Southridge Hills development area is nearly fully built, with the last
homes scheduled for completion before the year is out. KB Home is the
largest builder in Texas in terms of the number of units built, and
Southridge Hills "has been one of our highest selling communities
all the way through," said David Christian, president of the Fort
Worth division for KB Home.
"There
are a lot of happy homeowners," Christian added. "(Homes)
continue to sell at a fast pace."
Meanwhile,
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is carrying out a cleanup
operation throughout the development area.
Dwayne Ford, manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Formerly
Used Defense Sites program, said this week that crews toting high-tech
metal detectors are scanning the Southridge Hills development area in
search of buried metal objects, and excavation of suspected bombs is
expected to begin in August.
"They're
covering the entire site with geophysics instruments. They will take
that (data) to the office and run that with some processing to try to
weed out roofing nails and pieces of barbed wire. They will focus on
excavating items that we think are potentially ordnance items,"
Ford said. The excavation process will be decidedly low-tech, with
crews digging up suspected ordnance by hand, he added.
The
scope of the $1 million cleanup is expected to be limited to those
areas at the site that are not covered by driveways, roads and
foundations, and to those areas where residents allow access to their
private property. "Ordnance, unlike environmental contaminants,
require some type of human interaction before they're a problem,"
Ford said. Mark 23 practice bombs, which weigh about 3 pounds, are 8
inches long and carry a small explosive charge to aid pilots in
spotting where the bombs landed, are possibly present at the site,
based on "records and anecdotal evidence," he added.
Unexploded
bombs that may be present at the site could have the potential to
injure or kill people, according to Army Corps of Engineers reports.
In
1983, during the construction of a 35-acre mobile home park at the
former Five Points site, work was halted when a practice bomb was
discovered there. A cleanup on that site followed, and an estimated
3,000 practice bombs were recovered from that portion of the site.
During
a workshop in 2002, a KB Home representative "stated that his
subcontractors had found 26 (Mark 23) practice bombs," and
"an attorney representing approximately 80 homeowners in
Southridge Hills stated that he had nine (Mark 23) practice bombs in
his possession," according to an Army Corps of Engineers report.
Other bombs types were reportedly dropped at the site include the
100-pound M38A2 practice bomb and practice versions of the M47
chemical bomb.
A
group of about 190 current and former residents of Southridge Hills
are parties to a lawsuit against KB Home, as well as a land
development company and an environmental consulting company that also
were involved in the project. The lawsuit charges that there was
inadequate disclosure about the development site's former use as a
bombing rang. A hearing is scheduled in a
Texas
court next month.
Marcel
W. Weiner, the lead lawyer in this civil lawsuit, filed in 2001, said
this week that he now possesses about a dozen practice bombs recovered
from the development area, and he plans to use them as evidence in the
lawsuit. Weiner represents about 81 families and 140 individuals, he
said, and other homeowners have joined the case represented by other
lawyers, for a total of about 190 individuals and about 150 families.
Some residents want money back and they want the builder to buy their
homes back and to pay their legal fees, he said, and some homeowners
are seeking damages for the diminished value of their homes.
One
homeowner, Thea King-Lewis, who is named as a plaintiff in that
lawsuit, was also involved in a separate lawsuit against KB Home that
related to construction problems with her Southridge Hills home.
King-Lewis' separate lawsuit has been resolved and her home has
reportedly been bought back. A KB Home spokesman said the buy-back was
not related to the homeowners' disclosure lawsuit.
According
to court documents, King-Lewis stated in a sworn affidavit that she
was approached in 2002 by Victor Toledo, a KB Home representative who
allegedly "did attempt to coerce, bribe, induce, manipulate and
persuade me to sign…false affidavits." She also reported that
Toledo
"was unquestionably clear in his attempts to harass and force my
family and me into submission by the offer of financial compensation
as an inducement, in exchange for my signature on a false affidavit,
which would be used to give witness against Janet Ahmad in his pursuit
of future criminal actions against her."
Ahmad,
the leader of a home buyers' advocacy group, HomeOwners
for Better Building, is also entangled in the legal
morass relating to Southridge Hills and homeowner complaints against
KB Home. Ahmad was investigated by a grand jury and was indicted for
allegedly fabricating the discovery of a bomb at the housing site, but
in late May the
Tarrant
County
district attorney's office cleared Ahmad of all charges.
Ahmad
said this week that KB had "been doing a lot of creative
writing…they are between Disney and
Hollywood
with the creative writing," she said. In any case, the charges
have "been dropped and I'm so thankful for that," she said.
King-Lewis
said, "I'm very happy for her. That's all I can say."
Mark
Daniel, a lawyer representing Ahmad, said in a statement, "It is
regrettable that KB Home sought to bring a baseless criminal
prosecution in an effort to gain leverage and silence her efforts. I
respect the district attorney for acknowledging that this matter did
not constitute criminal activity."
Christian
of KB Home said that a grand jury, not KB Home, "found a reason
to indict Ms. Ahmad." KB Home, though, has filed a $20 million
civil lawsuit against Ahmad and others, alleging defamation and trade
disparagement, and that lawsuit has not yet reached trial. That
lawsuit relates to a protest waged by homeowners and others near a KB
Home sales center.
***
Send
tips or a Letter to the Editor to glenn@inman.com
or call (510) 658-9252, ext. 137.
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