Post office won’t deliver to Midway veteran due to dirt road erosion

Charles Dawson served his country with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, where he was exposed to burn pits that left him 100% disabled. He relies on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the cocktail of critical medications from the Veterans Administration that helps him enjoy life at home in Midway. 

Now, however, he faces a new threat to his health. The post office says it can no longer deliver his medication because the growing pile of sediment on Coopers Street keeps trucks from driving up to his mailbox without getting stuck.

For over two years, Dawson and his wife have been lost in a bureaucratic Bermuda triangle where city and county mandates overlap or entangle and no one in authority claims responsibility for the problem. 

Coopers Street is a short dirt road that slopes down from Martin Road, which is just off U.S. 17, the main drag through Midway. Dawson’s neighbor across the street, Gerald McDonald, said he’s lived there over 30 years, and that it was “just a little pig trail” until a few years ago. “They really, really should have done something [about the road] before they started building,” he told The Current. 

After two recent storms, the damage to Coopers Street was evident. The road surface started out flat, then became rutted like a piece of corrugated tin, then turned into a combination of ruts and deep ripples in a fine sediment along the side of the road where the new houses sit. The soft sediment accumulated as it reached Dawson’s mailbox post and driveway, then curved across his property in front of his garage and into the wooded wetlands.

Dawson stuck a welding rod into the sediment to mark its depth, which ranged from 2 inches in front of his mailbox post to 6-1/2 inches in his driveway. That sediment, he said, has caused delivery trucks from UPS and the U.S. Postal Service to get stuck. 

The stormwater runoff from the road has damaged Dawson’s property.

“It washed all this hardpan out and then all this sand has come in,” he said. “For me to do my yard, I’m going to have to redo sod.” He said the water from the road had washed out rock that he had put down.

“When it rains, and it starts flowing down,” he said, “it moves to this side of the road and you’ve just got like a river that comes down.” 

But Dawson’s home wasn’t the only one affected. 

Sediment in front of the other new houses on Dawson’s side of the street showed signs of tires spinning out. The driveways up the street had short strips of rocks to improve traction for vehicles coming in and out. Some of those rocks have washed down the street onto Dawson’s property.

At the beginning of Coopers Street lives one of Midway’s council members, Henry Stevens, Jr. Dawson said Stevens was sympathetic to his plight but had told him the council would not vote to upgrade the road.

A common problem

The local agencies that Dawson has been pleading with for two years — from the city council to the county planning commission — seem to agree that there is a problem. The city owns the road but has an agreement with the county to maintain it. The county says the road was not built correctly in the first place and that the builder failed to install proper ditches and drainage pipes under the new homes’ driveways, including Dawson’s. 

“Everybody’s in agreement that there’s an issue,” Dawson said, showing the stack of email correspondence that he has had with the Liberty Consolidated Planning Commission and Midway City Hall. “But no one will fix it.”

Dawson said he’s had problems since his family moved into a newly built home in 2021. From the start, he said that the way county crews grade the street obstructs their sprinkler system and exacerbates the accumulations of sediment from road work. 

“The stuff that the builder did, everything they did was legal.” Dawson said. “It’s [that] no one thought about this right here,” he said, pointing to the bed of sediment left by the road runoff. “And this right here would not have been the builder’s responsibility, anyway, according to LCPC.”

The first agency Dawson reached out to — the Midway City Council — told him the road is maintained by the county, and that he should address the issue to people there.

When he went to City Hall, Dawson told The Current, “They said, ‘We can’t do anything unless you go to the council meeting.’ So I signed up to go to the council meeting, and that’s when LCPC come out.” 

In a Georgia Open Records request to the Liberty County Building and Licensing Department for the construction permit on Dawson’s home, records showed a memo dated Jan. 12, 2021, to Director Paul Zechman from an administrative assistant. It read, “The property on Coopers Street, Lot #7, owners K.C. Contractors does not need a culvert.”

An Aug. 13, 2013, plat of the lots, of which Dawson’s was one, also shows Coopers Street as a dirt road where the right of way “varies.” The plat for the development, prepared by T.R. Long Engineering, also notes at least part of Dawson’s lot is in Flood Zone A for insurance purposes. That means the Federal Emergency Management Association says Dawson’s property has a 1-percent chance of flooding each year, and a 26% chance over the life of a 30-year mortgage, but does not analyze how high or deep the water might get.

When Dawson asked the county to solve the runoff problem, LCPC Engineering Director Mardee Sanchez wrote that her department engineers would work to find a temporary solution to the problem. 

Sanchez wrote Dawson, saying that one of her department engineers would work to find a temporary solution to the problem by changing the mix of the sediment used to pave Coopers Street and add a a shallow, grassy ditch in front of the new houses to direct the runoff into the woods at the end of the road.

The next day, Trent Long, a engineering consultant  for the county, replied, “Thank you for sending the pictures. I drove down Cooper[s] Street early this morning. I have contacted the Road Superintendent and requested that the road be graded as soon as possible. It appears that the shallow ditch that was in front of these lots was filled in during construction of the homes and driveway pipes were not installed. This ditch may need to be reconstructed and driveway pipes installed.”

Who’s responsible?

However, Long’s email did not say whether the city, the county, the private construction company who built homes on the street, or Dawson himself would be responsible for fixing the problem.

“After nothing was getting done,” Dawson said, “I kept going.”

In July 2022, Sanchez wrote Midway Mayor Levern Clancy that she had met with Dawson and noted the erosion and runoff problems in front of the homes. Sanchez pointed out that sediment had washed off the road and onto Dawson’s property because the road had not been built to drain correctly. Sanchez also told Clancy the road needed a cul-de-sac to prevent further destabilization of the road surface. 

While Midway’s code does not require developers to pave roads, install culverts, or create drainage ditches as preconditions for new construction, it does say that new construction or substantial improvements to existing structures shall be built in ways that minimize flood damage. Since 1955, city code also has required that when “any part of any street, sidewalk, alley or other public place of the city shall be torn or dug up for any purpose, the person making that excavation or opening shall have the duty of refilling the same condition that existed prior to the excavation or opening.” It doesn’t say anything about restoring an existing ditch that might have been filled in, as Long’s email described.

Dawson continued to reach out to Clancy and Sanchez, hoping for some remedy to the growing problem.

Dawson said some new road work occurred, but not in front of his home. In fact, that work created more obstructions on his driveway, according to emails exchanged between Sanchez and Long. 

On July 27, 2022, Dawson reported to Sanchez that the postal carrier’s van had gotten stuck.

A promise of a fix

On Aug. 8, 2022, Sanchez wrote to Dawson saying that the county road department was “1-2 weeks away from figuring out a fix for the problem and he’s not sure how long it will take to implement it.”  

Later that month, the county road engineers promised to lay down more stone in the gully of the street, “But nothing more beyond that. With this, I’m afraid there isn’t much more LCPC can help you with,” Sanchez wrote.

Dawson then turned to the city. He attended multiple city council meetings to complain about the city services. 

Midway Mayor Pro-Tem Clemontine Washington raised questions at city council about who had approved building permits at Dawson’s residence and asked whether a culvert was required. No answers to Washington’s or Dawson’s questions were recorded in city council minutes. 

When The Current asked Washington about Dawson’s problems with the city’s road, she said she wanted to know what Dawson was doing in a garage he had built on the property. Dawson told The Current that Washington was welcome to come see the road problem herself, as Clancy and Councilman Henry Stevens had. Stevens himself lives at the other end of Coopers Road, while Washington lives around the corner.

Escalating the request

In November 2022, Dawson wrote to State Sen. Ben Watson’s aide, complaining that he had run into a bureaucratic brick wall. But that didn’t work: “Watson’s office sent a letter saying ‘we can’t do anything.’”

By 2023, Dawson was getting more irate, as neither city nor county officials would step in to help. He started to allege favoritism, telling Sen. Watson’s office in an email that homeowners on private roads in Liberty County were getting answers to similar problems, while he was being ignored.

In 2023, the LCPC’s United Development Ordinance applied county drainage control regulations to the city of Midway. Those regulations are far more technical and detailed as to sedimentation and construction in floodplains. 

LCPC Director Jeff Ricketson told The Current that the city has an intergovernmental agreement with the county, under which the county grades and maintains dirt roads inside the city limits. But he added that the developer had “failed” to install drainage ditches and pipes under the driveways of the new homes.

Asked whether the county’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan would address upgrades to dirt roads in the county, Ricketson said paving the roads would cost too much. Instead, he said, county employees are busy grading roads somewhere in Liberty County every day. 

Ricketson provided The Current a list of roads in the county. Coopers Street is one of 498 dirt roads, some owned by local municipalities, others on private property. Some are maintained by the county; some, like Coopers Street, belong to one of the cities but are maintained through an agreement with the county. Others are maintained by private owners. Some are in unincorporated Liberty County but are not maintained by the county. And some on the list show no one responsible for maintenance.

Post office won’t deliver

Meanwhile, problems have escalated with the postal service, and with Dawson’s health.

As a veteran, Dawson has access to excellent health care, he says, but the type of prescription medication he needs can only be sourced through the Charleston, S.C., Veterans Administration facility. Dawson travels there twice a year for shots and lab work, but relies heavily on the mail to deliver insulin, COPD inhalers, and other medications not available through the VA in Hinesville, he said.

While the VA is great here, he said, “It’s one of those things. It is what it is. They can only do what they can do,” he said.

When the Midway postmaster, Bertie Ray, told Dawson in December that the USPS would be forced to hold the mail —including his and his wife’s prescriptions —until the “approach” to his mailbox is “filled and properly graded” so that the carrier can drop of mail without getting out of the vehicle, the couple got extremely worried. 

After his wife tried to talk to the post office, Dawson reached out to U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter’s office, which offered no quick fixes either. “Carter’s office said it was a paperwork issue,” Dawson said. “They can get involved with the post office, but not with the road.” 

On Feb. 14, Dawson and his service dog drove nearly an hour to Carter’s Savannah office to fill out a constituent services form, turned around, and drove back home. A staffer promised to call once she had more information about his request. The Current has asked Carter to comment on Dawson’s debacle and on federal funding for dirt road upgrades in the county.

The Midway post office gave the Dawsons a brief extension. Ray confirmed that the post office would deliver the mail if Dawson moved his mailbox, but refused to comment further without permission from the Postmaster General’s office in Washington, D.C. Last week, Dawson said, the mail stopped coming to his house.

Dawson, however, has decided to plant his feet in the sand and not budge. He says he’s spent enough of his own money when it’s the city’s road that’s piling up in front of his driveway to the point where the mail truck can’t turn around. 

“I’m just so frustrated with this. I’m just tired,” he said. 

Methods:

We used emails Dawson sent and received from city and county officials, sorted and counted dirt roads from a list of streets in Liberty County, and did multiple interviews. We measured the sediment's height and width in front of Dawson's house on Feb. 14, 2024 and took photos of the road after two recent rainstorms. We also consulted city and county laws about road maintenance and construction.

Type of Story: Investigative

In-depth examination of a single subject requiring extensive research and resources.