.jpg)
.png)
By Nakinskie Robinson
A city engineer along with a team from the Kingston and St. Andrew Municipal Corporation is conducting an assessment on the structure that collapsed in Torrington Park, St. Andrew on Sunday.
The staircase on the government-owned high-rise apartment building, which houses several residents, came crumbling down with one level falling onto another below.
An elderly woman is in hospital after she was injured when the stairway caved-in, while some four other people were rescued.
Several families have been displaced as the stairway provided access to 16 apartments.
Mayor of Kingston, Andrew Swaby, is set to provide an update and further address the matter on Monday when the assessment is complete.
Mark Golding, Member of Parliament for St. Andrew Southern - where Torrington Park is located - has called for the displaced residents to be temporarily relocated.
"I think if people could be re-housed while this is being fixed, that would be the ideal situation. Whether that's possible, I don't know. But at this point in time, we want to stop people coming onto this section, obviously, because this is very dangerous," he said.
The MP lamented that the building is faced with other infrastructural issues which need attention, but the process is being delayed by bureaucracy.
"The other issues of the building are to do with roofing things and so on. But the main dangerous part of it was the fact that the concrete and steel, which held the staircase up, was compromised and its cladding was falling off and all that kind of thing. So it was clearly a problem. It's just things take so long to be addressed and I don't think that there was a sufficient appreciation of the urgency of it," he argued.
According to Mr. Golding, he has been highlighting the need for repairs since 2018.
The technical team onsite on Sunday, told Radio Jamaica News that the overall structure was compromised and the likelihood of further disintegration is extremely high.
All feeds
