She Says That Due To Her Negligent Landlord And An Ice Storm, The Pipes Burst In Her Rental Home And Flooded The Place, Leaving It Unlivable
While many people have issues with their landlords, it’s extremely unfortunate when people have such negligent or stubborn landlords that they ignore a problem that eventually makes their home uninhabitable.
One woman based in Portland recently documented a horrific flood in her home, which she shares with three other people and a senior cat, on TikTok. The worst part of the incident is that she believes her landlord’s negligence played a big part in the damage.
Bella Jones (@jellabones) was renting a mid-century home in Portland with three roommates. In mid-January, a brutal ice storm hit Portland, and it led to the house’s furnace breaking down.
The heat had stopped working, and Bella and her roommates were freezing. She informed her landlord but didn’t hear back for a while. A pipe in Bella’s bathroom burst because of the cold temperatures outside and inside her house, and the water that flooded out began freezing over.
“The fire department came and shut off the water from an emergency valve outside of the house,” explains Bella in one of her TikTok videos.
“I told my landlord that I needed to evacuate and go to an Airbnb or hotel. He [told me] before I did that to try and shut off the water from inside of the house. But, he did not know where the valves inside of the house were.”
Bella did everything the fire department told her to do to shut her water off and prevent further pipe bursts. They also turned off her water from the outside of her home and the main water valve in her home.
However, unbeknownst to her, water was still flowing through her home from a source her landlord was supposed to shut off. So when Bella left her home for a few days and returned, more pipes had burst within her house, and she came home to a horrible flood.
In her most viral TikTok video, Bella’s house can be seen covered in water with holes in the ceiling and many of her items destroyed. The damage was so bad that the home became uninhabitable.
Anton – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
“I told [my landlord] the information that the fire department told me, which was that if I wanted to avoid any other further damage to the house, we needed to leave a faucet running before I left,” Bella recalls in one of her videos.
“My landlord told me not to, and I left on the 15th and returned home on the 20th to grab some belongings. That’s what my house looked like when I came back.”
Now, Bella, her roommates, and their cat have been displaced, and they aren’t sure where they’ll be living next. To raise some money to repurchase their belongings and afford a new home until any insurance situation gets sorted, Bella’s created a GoFundMe page.
“This fund would help benefit the renters to relocate to new housing, repurchase furniture, a commercial dehumidifier, storage costs for what we can recover, food, repurchasing college supplies, pet medicine, moving trucks, dry clothing, toiletries, new computers and other technology that was lost,” Bella wrote on the GoFundMe page.
“This event has been extremely triggering, as two of the people living in this home are college students who have struggled with homelessness at multiple points in their lives.”
We feel terribly for Bella and her roommates and hope they can find a new living situation soon.
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