A lawsuit casting blame for a massive landslide in Maggie Valley four years ago was settled at the 11th hour last week.

A jury pool had been called in, a judge seated on the bench and attorneys on both sides were lined up in preparation for a trial that was two years in the making.

But a last-minute out-of-court settlement was reached between the parties and the jury sent back home.

The suit was filed by a couple whose home was in the path of the landslide. They claimed an extensive retaining wall that snaked a few hundred feet across the face of the mountain at Ghost Town in the Sky amusement park collapsed, triggering the landslide. The couple sued the engineers and builders of the wall, along with the former owners of Ghost Town, for damages.

The settlement has not yet been filed in court. See next week’s issue of The Smoky Mountain News for more on the outcome.

A lawsuit casting blame for a massive landslide in Maggie Valley four years ago is headed to a jury trial in Haywood County this week.

A couple whose home was in the path of the landslide have sued a bevy of parties they claim are responsible.

Landslide hazard maps for the Wayehutta Creek watershed in the Cullowhee area of Jackson County were unveiled recently. The mapping is a baby step toward the much loftier goal of assessing the landslide risk for all the steep slopes in the county — a goal that is currently unfunded in Jackson.

The survey provides a topographical look at the watershed. It provides an inventory of potential slides and areas where slides have occurred.

To Jenifer Bauer, the conditions couldn’t be better for a hike. It’s cold and soggy. There’s no leaves left, nothing green at all on the forest floor save the rhododendrons and mountain laurels. Even the views are dreary and gray, leaving nothing better to look at than the ground beneath her feet.

Mitigating the deadly and damaging effects of mountain landslides might be as simple as understanding them.

For more than a month, 25-year-old Slyenia Rhein and her three children lived in a single hotel room with her mother, her father, her sister, a dog and a cat.

When a rockslide shut down Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge in Haywood County three years ago, the N.C. Department of Transportation scrambled to clean up the massive slab that sheered off the mountain and then shore up the towering rock face against future slides.

Twice in one week, the mountainside along Holder Branch Road in Canton slid away — and that was twice too many for 34-year-old mother of three Dara Parker.

The tragic death of a railroad worker investigating a fresh landslide along a rail line last week highlighted the hidden, yet inherent, risks for workers who are first on the scene in the aftermath of a slide. 

Joseph Drewnoski, 33, of Waynesville, was buried and killed by a landslide in the middle of the night while surveying tracks for storm damage near Black Mountain following a weekend of unrelenting rains. Norfolk Southern Railway got a report of a landslide on the tracks in the middle of the night and sent Drewnoski and another worker to check it out.

A Waynesville man who works for Norfolk Southern Railway was buried and killed by a landslide in the middle of the night Sunday while surveying tracks for storm damage following a weekend of unrelenting rains throughout the region.