An elderly Rotherhithe woman is “devastated” after she said a faulty radiator exploded with “boiling hot water” and ruined her home.
Christine Musgrove, 71, told the News got back from shopping on Thursday morning, September 29, to find alarms wailing and steam billowing from her windows.
Water dripped from the ceilings, the floor was drenched, her family photos were ruined and the electrics were broken. If she’d been in her home at the time seh says “she would have been burned to pieces”.
Speaking from a garden chair outside her home, Christine said: “I thought it was a fire at first. The whole house is ruined. It’s soaking wet in the living room, the hallway, there are big puddles and no electricity.”
A council tenant at the property for eleven years, she says she’s repeatedly asked the Council to fix her leaking shower and gathering mould.
But despite repeated requests for help and several visitations from council officers, she claims no maintenance has been done.
Christine says a council officer suggested she fix the mould by “getting on a stepladder and spray-painting it”.
Her niece, Claire Muldowney, 41, said: “She missed it by forty minutes. If that exploded while she was brushing her teeth she would have been burned to pieces.”
The family says the Council initially offered her temporary accommodation in Deptford and Peckham but, being in her 70s, she wants to live near family.
Southwark Council says Christine has accepted temporary accommodation at a hotel.
Claire said: “It’s ruining her home. She’s devastated because she’s got nowhere else to say. She’s so much her own person and she’s lived on her own for years. She’s got her own little ways and now she’s being pushed out of her own home.”
Southwark Council was unable to comment because the incident is now a legal disrepair case.