Volunteers help board up ‘attractive nuisance’ houses after flood

Four weeks after their house flooded and they escaped over their backyard fence, Mike, Eugenie and Sarah Parker watched a group of volunteers nail plywood boards across their home’s windows and doors.

Like many of the homes on Glenhaven and Timberlane drives, off South Beltline Boulevard, the Parkers’ gutted house is now what’s known as an “attractive nuisance,” meaning the homeowners could be held liable for injuries to trespassers.

“You kind of have to give that proactive effort even though we all know you shouldn’t go in somebody else’s house,” said Rachel Larratt, whose home on nearby Whispering Pines Circle also was badly damaged by the floods. “We just don’t want the neighborhood to fall apart while everyone is in limbo trying to figure out what to do with their homes.”

Carloads of volunteers from near and far – a church group from Spartanburg drove down for the day – poured out Saturday in front of a makeshift volunteer and donation center outside a home on Glenhaven Drive. They deployed throughout the neighborhood to help do yard work, sort donated clothes and other items and board up doors and windows in houses on Timberlane Drive.

“It’s hitting us now more,” Eugenie Parker said, tearing up as saws and drills whistled outside her house. “At first you just kind of have to survive. Yesterday, going home, you have that feeling of, ‘I don’t have a home to go home to.”

She was thankful, she said, for the volunteers who have continued to give their time in the neighborhood.

“For us to have to do this ourselves would just be way too painful to do,” Parker said.

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 7:27 PM.