Birch Mountain Earthworks

Review: I had a large costly interlocking retaining wall constructed by Birch Mountain Earthworks (BME) in the summer of 2003. Approximately 3-4 years ago I noticed the wall appeared to be tipping forward. I called BME and the owner met me at my home. He claimed the wall may just be settling and may or may not collapse but it was not his problem that the wall was tipping forward even though he built it. The wall continued to get worse over time and I had independent contractors view the wall. Each stated the wall was compromised and would eventually fail and result in collapse. At this point, (summer 2013) I contacted the owner of BME to view the wall again. Upon viewing the wall he agreed that the wall had failed and that it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. Again he claimed it was not his fault, that the wall had failed and his cost to rebuild it was more than it cost to build it in the first place. While continuing to evaluate how to handle this obviously incorrectly installed/constructed wall, it catastrophically failed on April 2, 2014.Desired Settlement: Correctly installed wall with little to no cost to us.

Business

Response:

About 3-4 years after the wall was installed [redacted] did some landscaping work in front of the wall and covered over the exit of the drainage pipes from the wall. While doing so he prevented the water from coming out of those pipes. This caused the wall that had no issues, to move to the point of failure. At the time I did visit the site, I explained to him the impact of what he had done and recommended to immediately clear the pipes out to let the drainage function. We assume that he took our advice or the wall would have fallen over sooner.

A few years after that [redacted] called again and I visited with him. He was planning to contact the manufacturer ([redacted]) and see if he could get them to pay Birch Mountain to rebuild the wall. In an email [redacted] forwarded to us (that he had sent to [redacted]), he told [redacted] how the work was perfectly done, noted in this email the date in French (28 aout 2012) that the [redacted] Representative [redacted] was onsite to oversee this wall and additionally authorized exactly how to build it during the construction of it.

Both [redacted] and Birch Mountain gave recommendations to help reduce the damage caused by [redacted] filling over the drain. To my knowledge [redacted] did not follow any of those recommendations.

Additionally, we offered to work with him to help him save cost. This involved options of him doing some of the work as he thought he may try to fix his own mistake.

It is true that we have indicated to [redacted] that we are not at fault because we did not fill over the drains and cause the wall to fail. He did.

Consumer

Response:

Review: [redacted]

I am rejecting this response because: