Apartment ceiling caves in after 8-month unfixed leak, resident says

By Kati Weis

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    AURORA, Colorado (KCNC) — A woman says she and her neighbors have been living in hazardous conditions for months at the Raft Club apartment complex in Aurora. Nicola Lucero says she’s had a leak in her ceiling for eight months, and despite multiple maintenance requests, apartment staff haven’t fixed it.

Finally this week, her ceiling caved in.

“I was like, ‘oh my god, it’s falling,’” Lucero recalled. “I thought the whole building was going to fall away because all of a sudden all the water (came down). Everything was flooded.”

Now, there’s a gaping hole in Lucero’s apartment unit ceiling, exposing what she believes to be black mold covering the rafters.

“You can smell the mold now,” Lucero said. “It’s not, it’s not sanitary at all.”

She said the leak started eight months ago with a slow drip, and grew into an issue where she had to keep buckets on her kitchen floor.

“Then all of a sudden it started dripping more, like a constant drip, for the last three months, just like a constant drip, taking out buckets, throwing it, every hour,” Lucero said.

She said she also has a leak in her upstairs bathroom. While she says maintenance has come out a few times to do patchwork fixes, the root of the problem still hasn’t been addressed.

“My manager, when I sent him out the video, he texted me and told me it was not an emergency. The video of (the ceiling) caving in, yes, the video of the ceiling caving in, he was like ‘oh it’s not an emergency, we have other emergency situations,’” Lucero said. “I’m like, ‘my ceiling just fell in, that’s not an emergency?’”

She pays $1,300 dollars a month rent, and says it’s not worth the stress. She’s now looking for a new place to stay, but worries for the next tenants, saying no one should have to live like this.

“They need to be accountable for their property,” she said.

The woman says other neighbors have been seeing leaks too. CBS4 called the property manager for a comment, but has not received a response.

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