House falls off stilts, family luckily not home

A household in Belize City can be considered lucky even though tonight they are sleeping much closer to the ground than they’d prefer.

The Smith family of number seventeen Kut Avenue in Belize City is literally trying to pick up the pieces after their formerly two-storey house was transformed into a broken bungalow. The crash, occurred around ten Saturday morning and split the house in two, ripping up the flooring, demolishing rooms and breaking a number of household items. According to Alfonso Vernon, who lived in the house along with his mother, Maureen Smith, no one was home at the time of the incident. Vernon said it was not until two hours after the event, that he heard about it.

Alfonso Vernon

“I heard about the news around twelve ‘o clock, Saturday, when I came back from my sister’s house from behind Faber’s Road extension. One neighbor came from round the lane that really helped us though, you know. We really find out and said that the house just fall down and she hear an incident like a screech before it dropped.”

Neighbors say they do not believe the weather was a factor in the incident, but that the wooden house was over thirty-seven years old and was already leaning before it crashed to the ground.

There are a number of Belize City houses in a condition similar to that of the Smiths. Their occupants, however, may not wind up as lucky as those on Kut Avenue.