Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1219206
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 8 MARCH 2020 OPINION REMEMBER what Forest Gump's mother always used to say? 'Life is like a box of choc- olates: you never know what you're going to get'… Well, I often feel the same way about the Internet. You might start out looking for something specific… but what you end up finding is very often something else altogether. This morning, for instance, I tried running a Google search for details of a story reported on TVM news yesterday. You may have seen it too: it consisted of a brief interview with a lady from Sliema – interspersed with close- ups of her damaged home – who expressed fears of sharing the same tragic fate as Miriam Pace last Monday… or, in her own words, "that our home collapses and comes crashing down on us, like what happened to that poor woman." The cause of her concern was also very visible in the accompa- nying footage: great big cracks and fissures had opened up across parts of the walls and ceil- ing, as a result of ongoing excava- tion works next door. In any case, I wanted to find a more detailed online version of the story; but by the time I woke up the following morning, all I could remember with any cer- tainty was that the house was in Sliema: somewhere around Sa- voy, but nothing more specific than that. Ah, but this is where the Inter- net comes in. Just a few choice keywords – 'Sliema', 'house', 'damage', 'excavation', etc – was all it took for Google's algorithms to work their magic, and instant- ly home in on precisely what I was looking for… … or so I thought, anyway. For the first link I found was about a "resident living next door to construction site"; and the main headline was: "Architect told us to be careful, as the building will come down sooner or later…" So I found myself reading about: "the Galea family of Sliema, whose home adjoins a construction site in Parisio Street where excavation, which has been ongoing for nearly six months, has already been carried out to a number of storeys below road level…." Hmm. So far, all the details match up… but something doesn't feel right. 'Parisio Street', for instance. I'm not at all sure that's the name I struggled so hard to remember this morn- ing… But no matter, I carried on reading: "George Galea showed us the fissures which he said had appeared as a result of the exca- vation. 'All over the house, es- pecially down here and where I have the kitchen and bathroom, and cracks have appeared even there. I have told the contractor several times about this problem, but he doesn't want to know, and has continued excavating. The contractor is supposed to have excavated up to a distance of two feet from our home. He has exca- vated right up to it, that is against the law, and he has ignored it. What can I do?'…" OK, by this point I figured out something was amiss (e.g., the name 'George' felt vaguely un- convincing, for a middle-aged woman from Sliema)… so I did what I should have done straight away, and checked the date. 'June 12, 2019'. Only then did I realise I was reading an arti- cle written nine months earli- er: about an entirely different household, in a different part of the same town… and yet, but for some trifling details here and there, the actual circumstances being described were almost per- fectly identical. So much so, that when I even- tually did find the correct arti- cle… it almost read like a copy- and-paste job. This, for instance, is from the more recent article, published last Thursday: "Several residents of Viani Street, Sliema…" – Yep, that's the one! – "have lived with the fear of their home collapsing because of cracks which devel- oped as a result of excavation works on an adjacent building site. […] They explained how in February last year cracks started developing in the walls and the beams while excavation works were being carried on a house nearby. […] 'When they started, I had breakages here and break- ages there, which continued to grow from one day to the next. I kept finding new cracks. Since the contractor started working, these have increased…" And just to seal this extraordi- nary resemblance between these two otherwise unrelated events: the second article even ends with the same sort of quote – in almost exactly the same words – that was used as its predecessor's headline: 'The architect told us to be careful because at one time or another [the house] might fall…'" I don't know about you, but I find it deeply disturbing that an event as serious as the one de- scribed on the news yesterday – with a woman practically re- duced to tears of desperation, as her own home crumbles around her thanks to the recklessness of nearby developers – would actually turn out to be so com- monplace, that it gets reported twice in the space of just nine months. And that's just from a quick search limited only to Sliema: and even then, only to cases which were reported in the news. Given the extent of construc- tion and/or excavation works currently going on in practical- ly all parts of the island – with new development permits being churned out at a seemingly expo- nential rate – well, the question almost asks itself. How many other people, right now, are living through the same (or comparable) levels of fear and anxiety, as expressed so forcefully by that woman on TV yesterday? The one we all heard supplicat- ing: "I do not want to get buried under the dust, and for my chil- dren to find me there. I have five grandchildren…"? In all honesty, that's not the sort of thing you want to hear anyone say even once (let alone twice in the same year… and a couple of days after the same fears were so hideously realised in Santa Venera). But I felt compelled to quote the exact words, because – to me, at any rate – they illustrate the precise crux of the problem that has been staring us in the face for the last few years. To put it simply: people have been made to feel so utterly help- less, that their only remaining recourse – even when their very lives are threatened – is just to Raphael Vassallo Cracks in the edifice I can't help but ask myself: does it really have to be that way? Is it so very difficult, to devise a national construction and development policy that really does place the rights of ordinary citizens at the core of all its decision- making processes?