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Collapsing structures
Dec 17, 2013 Editorial
Guyana had long prided itself as being outside the earthquake and hurricane belt. Indeed, the country has not been known to suffer from any earthquake but in recent times it has felt many tremors, some of them so hard that they actually sent people scurrying to locations of safety.
In one case, a tremor sent a motorcyclist crashing into a bridge. Luckily, the man survived but he sustained serious injuries. Strange as this may seem and given the nature of the constructions that abound in Guyana, no building has been known to collapse during tremor. The same cannot be said about the effect of high winds.
From time to time there would be squalls as the Atlantic winds collide with winds that roar along the tropical intercontinental zone. These are usually accompanied by rain. Strongly build buildings invariably survive but there are those that have been around for so long that even the tilts on which they stand become unstable.
So it was that when high winds lashed coastal Guyana on Saturday at least four came crashing down with the occupants inside. All of them were sited on the lower East Coast Demerara and were owned by people who probably never saw the need for maintenance over the more than eighty years they had been standing.
This is a remarkable contradiction when one considers that the government is always boasting about its housing programme. Indeed the government has distributed thousands of house lots and has supervised the construction of thousands of new homes. It caused the commercial banks to make loans available at reasonable rates but then again, this was only for the construction of new homes.
Therefore, those who had existing homes were left to their own devices. They would have had to seek loans under terms they would have worked out with the banks. Then there would have been the problem of many rural properties being what Guyanese call ‘children property’. These are property left by parents who failed to leave a will—who died intestate.
All too often these are left to collapse because each child refuses to knock a nail on the grounds that each is not an individual owner of the property. There are many of these in the villages. Three of them collapsed in the heavy winds over the weekend.
Such incidences highlight one of the shortcomings of national life. Most of the people who inhabit the houses that collapse are at the lower end of the economic ladder. They may have relatives who reside overseas and who could actually help rehabilitate the residence. But selfishness has crept into the family relationship.
As should have been expected the homeowners who have nothing left but rubble now want the wider society to help. We must wonder at how these people managed to feed themselves if they could not afford a nail for the proverbial barn door. But these are the people who would have constructed a temporary homestead if the need had arisen. In fact, following the collapse of the house there is such a need at this time.
In the city, the municipality once had a campaign that identified derelict buildings. The people conducting the campaign often had to get the Ministry of Social Services to move the occupants, particularly young children. We have never seen these people living on the streets.
The village councils should all have a similar programme through which they would identify the derelict buildings, some of which collapsed over the weekend. The occupants, having been forced to move, would have made alternative housing accommodation.
The reality is that once people are comfortable they do not look far for added comforts. At the same time, people on the outside would argue that the occupants are so poor that they can spare nothing for repairs. But new constructions could come crashing down also. There have been some slipshod work and we could very well see some new structures toppling.
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