Texas Man Finds Home Gone After Demolition Crew Sent to Wrong Address
The three-bedroom ranch-style home overlooking Lake Worth had been in David Underwood's family for decades, so it struck him as rather odd that he was having a hard time locating it after returning to Fort Worth from an out-of-town trip with his wife.
"We rounded the corner and my wife, Valerie says, 'The house is gone David,'" Underwood recalled to the Dallas Observer. "I'm looking at the yard, so I looked and I'm like, 'Wow, OK.'"
All that was left of their cherished property was a concrete slab and the sense that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
They were right on the nose: While the couple was away, a demolition crew had been sent by the city to tear down an adjacent house, but were accidentally given the wrong address.
"On July 12, 2013, contractors demolished the wrong property on Watercress Drive," the city said in a statement released this week. "The property to be demolished should have been 9708 Watercress Dr. The property that was demolished was a vacant structure located at 9716 Watercress Drive."
Vacant, because Underwood had been fixing it up so he and his family could move in on a permanent basis.
Suffice it to say, the house now needs more than a bit of caulking and a once-over on the unkempt lawn.
"A mistake was made," said Fort Worth's code compliance director Brandon Bennett, delivering the understatement of the year. "We have to identify where the weak link was and fix that so it doesn't happen again."
Underwood, meanwhile, is waiting for a check from the city's risk management department so he can rebuild his life — literally.
To his credit, the United Community Centers staffer is taking the whole thing in superhuman stride.
"I see people every day who have it so bad," he told the Observer. "I still have a house. It's not like I'm living in a cardboard box down by the river."