Waves from Hurricane Sandy damaged many seawalls in Manalapan. This photo taken Oct. 30, 2012,
shows the Arcaini estate (left) and its adjoining lot. The musician Yanni’s estate, right,
lost its seawall and had damage to the swimming pool and home.
File photo/The Coastal Star
By Thomas R. Collins
New Age musician and Manalapan resident Yanni has spent the last couple of years touring the globe on his World Without Borders Tour, performing soaring, soothing and mysterious numbers like Aria and Swept Away.
But in the world offstage, borders are all too real — and when they’re crossed, there can be trouble.
Yanni doesn’t have to look far for this to be apparent — it’s just as far as his own back yard.
The waves from Hurricane Sandy crashed into Manalapan’s coastline in October 2012, taking out the superstar’s seawall, destroying his pool and causing damage to his $11 million home on South Ocean Boulevard.
The seawall of his neighbor, Tonio Arcaini, also was lost to the storm — and it was lax maintenance of Yanni’s seawall that led to that failure, according to a lawsuit that is nearing trial.
The suit again raises questions about the need for the town to set regulations on seawall maintenance.
The corporation that owns the Arcaini home, 1260 Manalapan Properties, is suing the owner of the property next door, the John Y. Christopher trust, for the cost of the seawall’s reconstruction.
The suit contends that water slipped through the Yanni seawall, and some of it ended up behind the Arcaini wall, causing it eventually to bow outward and fail.
Kevin Richardson, the West Palm Beach attorney who represents the Arcainis, said the bill to repair the seawall and replace lost land was $375,000. Tonio Arcaini has real estate interests in Europe and owns companies that, among other things, market natural food products.
The Christopher trust — Yanni’s real name is John Y. Christopher — has filed a countersuit, saying it was actually the Arcaini wall that was the culprit and caused the Yanni seawall to fail, along with the pool and house damage, said its attorney, F. Bryant Blevins of Miami.
Richardson said that the lack of maintenance of the Yanni seawall was evident.
“There were holes and cracks in this seawall that got worse and worse over time,” he said. “This is kind of like a cavity in a tooth — if you leave a cavity in a tooth, over time it’s going to get bigger and bigger.”
The Yanni seawall received $2,750 worth of work to patch holes in 2008, and that is all the maintenance that was done between the time Yanni bought the house in 1998 and the day Sandy hit, according to maintenance documents Richardson said he has received.
The Arcainis spent $85,000 to refurbish and strengthen their seawall when they bought their home in 2009, Richardson said.
“There were no holes in my client’s seawall,” he said. The Arcainis also own a home at 1280 S. Ocean, which is not adjacent to the Yanni seawall — and did not suffer any damage although it was similarly constructed and maintained, he said.
Blevins, the Christopher trust attorney, said the work that the Arcainis did to their seawall is not significant.
He said he has testimony from the firm that did the work that “it was more aesthetic than functional. Their wall on the inside was just like ours,” Blevins said.
Moreover, the damage sequence is the other way around, he said — the failure of the Arcaini seawall led to the failure of the Yanni seawall.
“We have photographs of the plaintiff’s wall failing first,” he said.
He added that the sheer strength of the storm was such that seawalls of all kinds failed.
“It’s a superstorm, so if you look at the coastline, all types of walls failed,” Blevins said. “It was a storm of such magnitude that new walls failed, old walls failed, et cetera. Just as you’d expect from a storm of that strength.”
Yanni himself has not had much of a role in the litigation — the main contact person has been his sister, Anda Allenson, who represents the Christopher trust. Richardson has not listed Yanni as a witness whom he plans to call to trial, but said he is pursuing a deposition from the musician because he believes he was at the home at the time and would like to get his account.
Backing off regulation
The town of Manalapan has struggled with how much it wants to get involved in ensuring that oceanfront seawalls are properly maintained. It oversaw maintenance and repair for more than 50 years until 2003, when complaints over $1.8 million in repair cost assessments led town officials to leave maintenance up to individual homeowners.
Then, after Sandy hit and its storm surge took out a dozen seawalls, commissioners revisited the idea, only to abandon the concept nine months after the storm when residents complained the approach would be too costly. The regulations would have required that seawalls more than 2 years old, including those on the Intracoastal Waterway as well as the ocean, be certified by an engineer as capable of withstanding a storm as strong as Hurricane Andrew.
Some of the discussion of the issue has revolved around the ripple effects failing seawalls could have on the town as a whole — potentially making homes uninsurable and driving down purchase prices and property values.
Former Town Commissioner Donald Brenner, an engineer by training who oversaw the review of possible regulations, said that the lawsuit that is now playing out between Yanni and the Arcainis is an example of why more oversight is needed, likening regulations to a national defense.
“Oversight of structures that have an effect on the overall community requires governments to act sensibly,” he said. “Sometimes it might not look like it’s good for you, but sometimes it’s the best way to do it. We can’t have each state have an army.”
Mayor David Cheifetz said that after Sandy “it was our contention that the reason the seawalls failed was because they were in different states of repair.” But the reaction to regulations was resoundingly negative, he added, and that is unlikely to change.
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