My neighbor put a pool in during the summer of 2023, and by fall my backyard was standing water every time it rained. I hired an engineer to inspect the grading, and he said the construction had changed the natural slope and was sending runoff directly toward my foundation. The repair on my side was estimated at nineteen thousand dollars, but my neighbor refused to discuss it. I went to the architectural review committee because they had approved the pool, and the chair told me their approvals were aesthetic only and that drainage was a county matter. So I called the county myself and was told the pool permit required a drainage plan, and that a plan had been submitted with the application.
I got a copy of the permit file, and the drainage plan was stamped by an engineer. It showed the runoff leaving the property toward the street, which would have explained why the county approved it. But when I showed it to my own engineer, he immediately noticed something was wrong. He asked me where I’d gotten it and told me to come back to his office with the original. The stamp belonged to an engineer who had retired in 2019 and surrendered his license that same year. Someone had apparently used his old credentials to make the drainage plan look legitimate. I called the county and asked how they had accepted a document carrying a license that had been inactive for years, and suddenly the woman who had been answering my questions stopped giving me straightforward answers.
Then my engineer noticed the preparer’s block at the bottom of the plan. It listed a company I’d never heard of, so I looked it up through the state records. The company had been formed in 2021, and the same company appeared on eleven other permit applications in our subdivision. All eleven involved pools, additions, or major landscaping projects that changed drainage patterns, and several had been approved within weeks of each other. The registered owner wasn’t the retired engineer whose stamp appeared on the plans — it was the same person who had prepared my neighbor’s application, and when I pulled the other ten files, his name appeared on every single one.
