Georgia Apartment Ceiling Caves in with People Inside

I live in an apartment complex in Lithonia, Georgia, called Highland Grove Apartments. On Thursday, September 4th, I heard a feint dripping sound in the walls. I assume it is not a major problem, but I went upstairs to see if the resident upstairs my have left the water running. They let me in and to my surprise I’m shown a bathroom vent leaking a constant stream of water.

After I see how bad it has become on this floor I go up to the floor above them to see if anything is wrong with the residents that live there. I knock twice but I get no answer. So I run downstairs to call maintenance. As soon as I step foot into my apartment floor, my shoe smushes down into a soaking wet carpet.

I give a call to maintenance at around 8:30 AM. I’m told that someone is on their way to come fix the leak. At around 9:00 AM, I check back with the resident directly above me. He lets me see his apartment again, but this time his entire living room ceiling has become brown. I run downstairs to see my ceiling. Low and behold my ceiling was turning brown from all of the water. At 9:30 AM the maintenance guys comes. He says that he needed to go get a key and a crew.

It felt like forever although it was only 30 minutes of time that passed since the maintenance guy came. Then I heard a quaking sound that sounding like somebody had dropped a sofa from mid-air. I run upstairs and the ceiling had caved in on a visitor of the resident directly above me as he was walking through the living room. Luckily sheet rock was not massive enough to cause any serious damage to him. After speaking with the visitor and his family, I find out an ironic fact. He is currently there because he evacuated his house earlier in Louisiana due to Tropical Storm Gustav only to be hit on the head by a flooding apartment. Finally the maintenance crew comes and finds out that the resident on the third floor above me has had a seizure as she was running her bath water.

It turns out that the water had starting overflowing at around 5:30 AM. It slowing saturated the floor which was in turn the ceiling for the resident on the second floor. The weight of the water combined with the ceiling itself was too much for the sheet rock to handle. The unlucky vistor happened to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. Although they were not seriously, the water mixed with the insulation creates a brown solution that emits an unpleasant odor resembling urine.

No doubt the apartment complex did everything they could, I still regard them as pretty decent as far as management.