Some residents of Cincinnati's East End neighborhood are concerned about hillside movement affecting several properties along Riverside Drive.
Those are located from the 1900 to 2200 blocks of the street.
Resident Betty Burns said it is not an isolated problem affecting one or two properties. She said there are several questions.
"Is there a cause, a single occurrence cause, that caused this and how do we prevent it going forward?" Burns asked.
Resident Jerry Burns hired an engineering company to study his property and prepare a report. He said he noticed what he calls dramatic movement starting in June.
"This cannot be resolved by individual property owners doing one-off studies," Burns said. "We really need the city to get involved and help us determine what's really going on in our neighborhood and how we're going to fix it."
Lewis Siler had written a letter to city council requesting information. He said data needs to be collected on the movement.
"We need to determine whether this community is viable. We need to determine whether it makes sense for there to be infrastructure repairs," Siler said. "Because determining and monitoring is a whole heck of a lot cheaper than getting down the road and having ourselves be millions of dollars in further damage before we even know what the problem is."
There have been reports of damage to houses and even cracked sidewalks.
City Manager Harry Black issued a memo on the hillside movement in October.
"In total, fifteen residential structures on the uphill side of Riverside Drive between 2150 and 2206 Riverside Drive reported as being damaged by hillside movement," Black wrote. "The buildings are four-story structures constructed in 1999. Although all of the structures show evidence of being affected by movement, the structures at 2174, 2178, and 2182 Riverside show signs of severe damage."
Another city report said some of the issue is due to "a fairly well defined landslide that begins immediately on the downhill side of the pier wall on Columbia Parkway."
The city estimates it would cost about $52,000 for one year of monitoring. City officials are also concerned about setting up monitoring equipment on private properties.
Council's neighborhoods committee is asking city administrators to review the latest information submitted to the committee during a meeting Monday and report back.
