PORT ANGELES — Three months after a man Barbara Porter had known since he was a boy allegedly drove a bulldozer through her backyard, noises from passing trucks still sometimes startle her awake at night.
“If I hear a diesel pickup [truck] at night, it will wake me up, and you immediately think ‘Barry,’” Porter said Friday in an interview at her North Pioneer Road home in Gales Addition, just east of Port Angeles.
“But then you think, ‘He’s not here,’ and you go back to sleep.”
Porter, 72, is referring to Barry Swegle, a 51-year-old Port Angeles man accused of using a bulldozer he owned to tear a swath of destruction through the neighborhood where he had lived for decades.
“You still have the fear when you hear noises,” Porter said of the May 10 rampage that left four homes in her neighborhood damaged or destroyed.
“It’s not as bad as it was.”
Swegle now sits in the Clallam County jail in lieu of $1 million bail, while those impacted by what Swegle allegedly did continue to recover.
The Clallam County Sheriff’s Office estimated at the time that more than $300,000 worth of damage was done when the bulldozer trampled homes, outbuildings, a Ford F-250 pickup truck, a riding lawn mower, a boat and other property, and knocked down a power pole, which cut electrical power to thousands of people.
Barbara Porter said Friday she and her husband, James, have so far replaced a stretch of fence and 15 decorative Cyprus trees that the bulldozer ripped from their property in the late morning of May 10.
Porter said the carnage erased a great deal of work she and her husband had put into their backyard.
“We just got it to where it was looking halfway decent,” Porter said with a chuckle.
“We had to start over, and that was 500 and something dollars’ worth of trees we replaced.”
Before the Porters’ backyard was damaged, the bulldozer pushed a manufactured house owned by the Porters’ neighbor Dan Davis, 74, completely off its foundation and into the Porters’ property.
The bulldozer driver continued east through backyards along Pioneer Road, severely damaging a third home before heading north to Davis’ personal home along East Ryan Drive.
The rampage made news around the world, reaching as far as New Zealand and Malaysia, according to The Seattle Times and other media.
The attack inspired an animated re-enactment produced by a Taiwanese production company, and producers of the television show “20/20” have said they plan to mention the dispute in an episode focusing on neighbor disputes scheduled to air this month.
Witnesses and law enforcement officials have said Swegle had a long-simmering dispute with Davis over a fence Davis had built near Swegle’s dirt driveway.
Davis’ home still stands three months later, though the two gaping holes torn through it by the bulldozer have made it uninhabitable.
Davis, who is living with his wife, Mary, in a temporary home his insurance company found for them in the Sequim area, said he still doesn’t know whether his home on Ryan Drive can be salvaged or whether it needs to be torn down.
“I would say the coin hasn’t landed yet,” Davis said.
The bulldozer also destroyed Davis’ prized pickup truck, boat and trailer and garage. He’s still working with his insurance company to recover money for most of the damage, he said.
On his Pioneer Street property, Davis has been spending the past three months supervising installation of two manufacture homes, both of which he expects to be done by September.
Davis declined to estimate the costs of installing the two homes, though he said clearing the damage done by the bulldozer before rebuilding added significantly to the cost.
“It cost a lot more for me to redo it than it did to do it originally,” Davis said.
Davis said, however, that any object can be replaced and that what is most important to him is that no one got hurt during the May 10 incident.
“Life goes on, no matter what happens,” Davis said.
“You’ve got to live to the best of your ability.”
Next door, the Porters are still cataloguing the belongings destroyed when Davis’ manufactured home was pushed into two of their sheds.
Barbara Porter said one of the sheds, which contained many of her husband’s tools, was pushed off its foundation and effectively destroyed.
“It’s all crooked. You can’t fix it,” Porter said.
“It just needs to be taken down.”
James Porter said he had to pry what tools he could from a tool chest that had all its drawers bent so much they couldn’t be opened.
Others were simply destroyed, James Porter said, ground into the soil by the bulldozer’s treads or thrown away in the cleanup in the days following the incident.
The Porters’ second shed, containing gardening supplies and holiday decorations, was merely pushed over, Barbara Porter said, adding that nothing got broken, not even the shed’s small windows.
Barbara Porter said she and her husband are working with an attorney to help recover the costs of what was lost, though the couple could not offer a firm damage estimate.
As the Porters have inventoried the damage, Barbara Porter said Swegle’s older brother, Jeff Swegle, has been in touch about compensating the Porters for the damage caused during the bulldozer rampage.
“[Jeff Swegle is] trying to make it right with everybody,” Porter said.
In a Friday interview, Jeff Swegle said he has been in contact with the Porters and is waiting to hear more about their damages from the Porters’ attorney before paying for what was lost.
“As long as their damages are within reason, we’ll settle up with them,” said Jeff Swegle, who said he has worked with another property owner farther east on Pioneer Road to pay for a fence destroyed when the bulldozer was driven through it.
He said he has yet to work out repaying damages done to Davis’ properties and the power pole owned by the Clallam County Public Utility District that was toppled by the bulldozer.
Jeff Swegle said he has power of attorney over his brother’s logging equipment and has talked with him about selling some of it to pay for the repairs.
“I sold some of [Barry Swegle’s] equipment, and the proceeds of that equipment [are] going toward payment of damages,” Jeff Swegle said.
________
Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
