Residents react after staircase collapse injures woman, displaces occupants
AFTER the collapse of a staircase on Sunday afternoon that injured one woman, residents of a more than 30-year-old apartment building in Torrington Park housing scheme in St Andrew are breathing a collective sigh of relief that the situation was not worse, but are worried for the safety of themselves and their children.
When the Jamaica Observer team arrived on the scene, the staircase leading from the second to the third floor at the front of the building was resting on the bottom step leading to the ground floor, surrounded by large chunks of rubble.
The clearly shaken residents, some of whom had to be rescued from their apartments by firefighters, could be seen milling around outside the police caution tapes, speaking amongst themselves about the incident that left 50-year-old resident Althea McIntosh, injured. She had been sitting on the stairs when it collapsed.
McIntosh was assisted to Kingston Public Hospital by the police.
Residents said that some minutes after 2:00 pm yesterday, they heard a loud rumbling and at first thought it was an earthquake, but were shocked when they saw the stairs give way and crash below. No one could confirm the total number of people impacted but the Observer understands that more than 20 residents have been displaced.
A resident who gave her name as Rosie said she was outside at the time of the incident and heard someone calling out to Althea — the injured woman — to get down as the building was collapsing, but she dismissed the warning, saying this was not the case.
“By the time she fi seh so, the whole building came down with her. Mi think she dead! The children play on and underneath the staircase like everyday [so] God was in the midst today,” she said.
Rosie, who also acts as a community liaison officer, said she is worried about the state of the other flights of stairs and the rest of the deteriorating building, fearing that one day the roof of her top-floor apartment, which has been breaking away, will cave in on her.
“Can you imagine this building is here from 1988 and until now it [has] never [been] service[d] once?” she asked incredulously.
She said the deplorable state of the building has been brought to the attention of the authorities, who were reportedly to have rectified the situation a year ago, but nothing yet. She said the rains the country has been experiencing in the past weeks, coupled with the recent earthquakes, have only worsened the situation.
“A year now they came and have a community meeting with us…They came with engineers. That was last year September and they said the work would start by November last year, and this is November 2024 and this come happen — one year after. Nutten nuh fix,” she said.
But Leader of the Opposition Mark Golding, who is also Member of Parliament for St Andrew Southern in which the Torrington Park property is located, told the Observer that he has been trying for four years to have the building addressed.
“This is a long-standing problem… over time there’s been wear and tear and decay, and they’re not safe,” he said, adding that there are some other issues with the building as well.
“I’ve been writing to the prime minister and his ministry about it, because housing comes under him. A year ago we had a community meeting because the work was supposed to have started. It never did start. They wrote to me last Wednesday to tell me that the procurement commission blocked it from going through as an emergency procurement and said the contract had to go to limited tender, and a few days after, this is what has happened with the staircase collapsing,” he later told the residents via a bullhorn.
Golding also shared with residents that he had spoken to the prime minister regarding the incident and that he promised to mobilized the National Works Agency to see if something can be done immediately to address the staircase situation.
“I spoke to Desmond McKenzie, minister of local government…and he is mobilising an officer to come and have a look at the situation as well,” he added.
Residents are blaming the collapse on neglect. Some say they had observed the building rapidly deteriorating and on the brink of collapse, and had sought to get the relevant authorities to address the situation, including sending pictures and videos of the rotting stairs and cracked building.
The injured woman’s niece, who gave her name as Akera, also decried the poor state of the aged building. She visits her family at the location often, from Toronto, Canada, where she resides, and said on that morning she had heard residents commenting that the steps “had seen its last days”.
“It was already shaking and it was not stable, and residents have been making reports to the authorities. Big chunks of the building would fall down.”
Her cousin, Shanice Dixon, concurred. Dixon, who is the daughter-in-law of the injured woman, said she knew the building would break down, but didn’t expect it would be the staircase.
“I was lying down and heard the excitement…At first I thought it was the ceiling that collapsed….and I heard that [Althea] came down with the stairs, so I was shocked. I throw off the slide window, I went to the back and throw [my daughter] through the window for somebody to catch her,” she said, noting that she took the chance to come down the collapsed steps with other residents.
In the meantime, Golding urged residents not to walk under the lower staircase, which now has the weight of the middle staircase resting on it.
“The lower staircase is bearing a lot of extra load. Please don’t walk under there. I know it’s inconvenient not to be able to walk under there but every time you traverse under there where the yellow tape is, you’re taking a big risk because that lower staircase is not built to bear that additional weight and, in any event, it is not in good condition anyway.
“We’ll just have to wait until the engineers come and do an assessment from the National Works Agency to see what the situation is, going forward. In terms of people who live in the apartment served by the first staircase, they can’t stay there tonight and until this issue is resolved so we’re gonna have to see what we can do in terms of alternative accommodation for them. I’ll just ask each and everyone to pull together in the spirit of community and love and help each other in this difficult situation,” he said.
The collapsed staircase of a decades-old apartment building in the Torrington Park housing scheme in St Andrew, which injured a woman on Sunday afternoon.
Firefighters assist one of the residents of Torrington Park in St Andrew to make his way to the ground floor of an apartment building after a section of a staircase collapsed on Sunday.
