Nineteen apartments were flooded when the roof collapsed on an Oxford Street tenement.
By Scott Taylor
Staff Writer

LEWISTON – A tenement roof collapsed under heavy rain and left 43 people homeless Thursday.

Flooding from the roof of the north building of the Place Saint Marie apartments at 64 Oxford St. roused sleeping tenants from their beds at about 4 a.m. Thursday. By 6 a.m., city officials were turning off power to the building and evacuating the tenants.

“I woke up at about 4 a.m. and thought I’d spilled a glass of water in my bed,” said Tracy Johansen. “I looked up and it was like a waterfall pouring out of my ceiling.”

Johansen abandoned her third-floor apartment in the 19-unit building before 6 a.m., taking her children to her mother’s house. By the time she returned at 6:20 a.m., the ceiling of her apartment had collapsed.

“I just got a new computer,” she said. “That’s ruined. My couch, my table, everything is ruined, gone.”

Most tenants spent the morning gathered on a landing between the south and north buildings, watching crews work to unclog the storm drain and trying to figure out where they were going to go and what was going to become of their belongings.

Sue Reny, of Reny Property Management, said she was working with the United Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross to find temporary housing for her tenants. Reny manages the apartments for S&S Realty Group in Gray.

Already strapped financially after a series of fires earlier in the year, the Red Cross and the city of Lewiston opened the Lewiston Multi-Purpose Center at noon as a temporary shelter.

Reny said she was hoping to place most of the tenants in the Chalet Motel on Lisbon Street.

“It looks like it’s going to be three weeks to a month before we can get things back on line there,” Reny said. “So we really need to find something for these people in the meantime.”

Mike McBride, maintenance supervisor for Reny Management, said he suspected that concrete seeped into the pipes that connect the building’s roof drains to the city storm sewer. Wednesday night’s heavy rains overwhelmed the drains and the flood waters backed up onto the roof.

Contractors had finished pouring a concrete floor in the center of the building last week, he said, and an inspector from the state Housing Authority was scheduled to inspect the work Thursday morning.

“But we can’t say if this had anything to do with today’s problems,” McBride said.

Third-floor tenant Claudia Limoges said she first discovered a small leak in her ceiling at 11 p.m. Wednesday. She called the property managers and maintenance worker Roland Littlefield responded. Littlefield inspected the leak, gave Limoges a bucket to collect the drips and promised to return Thursday morning.

“It was just very small at the time,” Littlefield said. “It just got much worse overnight.”

Water from the roof was leaking down from floor to floor, said city electrician Gerry Caron.

“Of course, the easiest path is through the electrical boxes,” Caron said.

Water was leaking through the electrical outlets and the fire detectors when Lewiston Fire Inspector Paul Ouellette arrived after 5:15 a.m., he said.

“So we made the determination to turn off all power to the building,” he said. “Of course, all of the life protection devices in the building were deactivated, so we decided to evacuate the building. It became uninhabitable at that point.”

City building and fire inspectors and Reny property managers inspected the south building Thursday morning to make sure those apartments wouldn’t flood during future storms, McBride said.

“But they are OK,” he said. “We checked them over pretty carefully, and they don’t have the same problems.”

And while some crews struggled to find the the clogged drain, McBride had others installing new drains in the ceiling that would empty from third-floor apartment windows.

“Now, we need to make sure if we get more rain, things don’t get worse,” McBride said.

staylor@sunjournal.com