DENVER — Cracked, dilapidated sidewalks and divots in the road would normally be an eyesore and an inconvenience for people who live along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Marion Street in Denver’s Whittier neighborhood. But for Lauren Bruce and her neighbors, they have become more of a burden.
“There are three main points in the road, and every time a truck hits them, the house shakes,” Bruce said.
Bruce describes it like a small earthquake in her home. She loses sleep over it, feeling the home shake after 4 a.m. when morning traffic drives nearby. She hears her century-old home creak and crack with every major truck.
“With I-70 closing, all the traffic has been coming through on MLK since it’s a big east-west corridor,” Bruce said. “And all that traffic has just been hitting these patches and causing our house to shake.”
Bruce and her neighbors believe the extra traffic and the road conditions are warping their homes, causing them to come apart at the seams.
“You can feel them coming from half way down this way, from Martin Luther King,” said Delia Rojas who lives next door, right along MLK.
Rojas says she’s having similar issues that seem to have been accelerating over the past three months. Her tub has begun separating from the wall and tiles are cracking in the kitchen.
“Granted, it was crooked because it was built in 1908 or something like that, but it never sunk like my kitchen has now,” Rojas said.
Bruce says in the summer of 2018, Xcel Energy contracted a pipe project along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Site Wise. She claims the contractor ripped up their sidewalk for the work and created three spots in the road that needed to be covered up with a patch job. Denver inspectors told Bruce these were not permanent patches, and they should have been replaced three days after the project was complete. Bruce says that work was never completed.
FOX31 reached out to the supervisor with Site Wise for this project, but were told he couldn’t give a comment. Meanwhile, Bruce and her neighbors are dealing with structural damage, spending thousands of dollars on repairs to keep their homes stable.
“It’s the biggest investment we’ve ever made in our lives, so it’s scary for us on a personal financial level,” Bruce said.
Bruce says a new contractor was out on Saturday to begin fixing the job. A representative with Xcel Energy tells FOX31 they will have a crew out on site Sunday to make sure they’re working toward a permanent solution.