The Canefield, East Canje resident whose concrete house has started to crack after a Digicel tower was erected right next to it earlier this year is pleased that the company contacted him after a news item appeared in this newspaper and is taking steps to have the problem rectified.
The resident, Pradeep Kuma had expressed concerns that his house would collapse due to the cracks and said sections of his yard has started to “sink.”
Apart from those problems, he said the vibrations had also caused the tiles from his bathroom to loosen and his windows to break. He contended that “if my house is supposed to last 50 years, it can’t last so long anymore.”
Kuma said officials of the company spoke to him via telephone last week and promised that they would send someone immediately to examine the problem. But he said a ‘local’ engineer did not come until Monday night to check the reports and to take pictures.
He told Stabroek News (SN) that the same engineer had visited before on two occasions when he raised the issue with the company and had taken pictures. “I ask he where are all the other pictures that he take out before.”
According to Kuma the engineer’s father was the contractor responsible for driving the piles and he “kept saying that nothing much is wrong with the building and that nothing more would happen to it.”
The following morning he sent another engineer that works in Berbice to check and he recognized that the “earth is moving and that would cause the house to break up more.”
Further, he said someone brought a letter and asked him to sign to uplift it. But he refused to sign as he was not satisfied with a part of the letter which read: “Please note that most, if not all of your complaints and allegations in the past have been dealt with by the company and there is little doubt that the situation will differ this time around…”
He told SN, “They never dealt with any of my complaints. Every morning when I wake up I see a new problem.”
The left side of his house is just 16 feet away from the company’s fence and he said that the company “dug a base about 15 to 20 feet down and drove about six piles and that caused the house to crack.”
He said that a tower of that magnitude should have been assembled in a big, open space and wondered who had given permission for it to be in a residential area.
He said he had brought the problems to the attention of the company’s engineers when they visited during the construction. The engineers examined the problems on two occasions and even took photographs and “promised to return to paste the cracks and to offer compensation” but they did not.
A Digicel official had told this newspaper when contacted that the engineers that Kuma would have spoken to during the construction phase had already left the country.
He had also said, “The management team was unaware of the problem and now that we are aware of it we have taken immediate steps to have it corrected.”
