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Halted construction filling US waterways with silt
esidents in a subdivision of two-story brick homes near the North Carolina state line say they were promised roads and ball fields and tennis courts. But the developer has vanished and the neighbors never came so, when the rains do, the ground crumbles.
The potholes at Edenmoor are big enough to swallow car tires these days. With every deluge, miniature Grand Canyons carve through the red clay of the abandoned home sites, clogging a nearby stream with dirt and adding to a growing environmental problem.
The housing bust that has pockmarked the nation's landscape with half-built construction projects has done more than crash home values. Federal officials and environmentalists says abandoned developments are polluting nearby waterways with sediment, endangering fish and plant life and flooding areas where the silt has built up.
"We have some that are still not being taken over by anybody or they're in limbo or they're in litigation and they're just sitting there, bleeding sediment into the state's waters," said Mell Nevils, director of the Division of Land Resources in North Carolina. He estimates that 40 halted and abandoned projects are polluting waterways in the state.