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North Sound home falls into the Skagit River

By Joanna Small
By Joanna Small

A house in the North Sound is now in the Skagit River, and the collapse was caught on video.

Flooding devastated the small towns of Lyman and Hamilton last fall, making three homes on a bluff above the river too dangerous to inhabit.

The river had been slowly taking pieces of the Lyman house Sherry Taxdahl and her family had put their hearts and hands into since buying it 12 years ago.

"It didn't even have (a) foundation when we bought it, so we put a new roof, tile, cabinets, foundation, cupboards—everything,” Sherry said Thursday when we met her in an Arlington park.

Her son and three granddaughters moved into the house 10 years ago and moved out Thanksgiving weekend, when massive flooding endangered their house and the two next door.

We talked with one of the other homeowners then, who told us he and his wife were staying with family and sleeping on the living room floor.

Sherry’s family moved into a camper, then a small apartment, and now a rental house.

They didn't come back to the house on the river very often, but Sherry was there just hours before the collapse Wednesday night.

She watched it go on video shot by her neighbor.

"I cried. It was heartbreaking,” she said.

The November floods caused more than $1 million in damage to the small town of Lyman alone, stranding horses and livestock, swallowing farmland and seeping into homes and buildings.

But none of it was quite as devastating as watching the Taxdahl's house go over the cliff, and while it's irreplaceable, the Taxdahls will have the property assessed next week and are hoping for a Federal Emergency Management Agency buyout.

"It's supposed to be before-disaster market value -- so we'll see,” Sherry said.

In the meantime, her son is still paying more than $1,100 a month for a mortgage on a house now sitting in the Skagit River.

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