Family shaken as tree falls on house

Janet Lee gesticulates in front of a tree which fell on her Ste Madeleine house Tuesday night.
Janet Lee gesticulates in front of a tree which fell on her Ste Madeleine house Tuesday night.

SHARLENE RAMPERSAD

JANET Lee yesterday counted her lucky stars that both she and her son were not injured when a large tree at the back of her Ste Madeleine house came crashing down onto their room Tuesday night.

Lee said the tree collapsed as a result of soil erosion and she has been pleading for donkey years with the authorities to clear a watercourse at the back of her George Street home. Lee, 63, said that both she and her son Allister Lee, were at home at 7.30 pm when they heard a cracking sound. Within seconds, the tree fell onto Allister’s bedroom. The branches covered the house.

“I just hear, ‘brap, brap, brap’, and then I felt the house shake and Allister was saying, ‘the tree fall on the house’,” Lee said. “For the past 40 years, I have been begging officials to come and fix the water course behind my house. Every time it rains, we get flood over ten feet high and they keep coming and clearing the watercourse on the other side but no one paid us any attention,” she said.

Local Government Minister Kazim Hosein and members of the Princes Town Regional Corporation’s Disaster Management Unit, visited Lee yesterday.

However, Hosein’s visit did not sit well with Lee, who complained that the minister seemed aloft and uninterested. “He pulled up in his big van, sat in the back seat and was on his phone for about 45 minutes.

“When he came out he was still on his phone. He left soon after without saying anything to me. A short while later, he returned. He came and said that I had been telling people he didn’t come out of the van and that I started to talk loud. In the end, he apologized to me and I also apologized to him,” Lee said.

Minister Hosein has pledged to have the tree cut up and removed but Lee said if something is not done about the soil erosion, her entire house could soon collapse.

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