More on the perils of warden-less accommodation

19/09/2008

In response to the article about wardens (MT, September 2008), I thought I'd let you know of an incident my wife and I experienced recently.

We were invited to an 80th Birthday celebration at a sheltered accommodation in Keynsham on the outskirts of Bristol. We arrived to a certain degree of consternation as, although the electricity was on, all the mains sockets had "blown" and it wasn't possible to make hot drinks in the kitchen. This in itself, whilst inconvenient, wasn't critical and in the true "Spirit of the Blitz" residents overcame the situation by boiling up kettles and pans in various homes and carrying them to the kitchen - problem solved!

However, it transpired that something far more serious had also taken place - namely the emergency buzzers in the various accommodations were inoperative. The warden who formerly was resident had been withdrawn and was no longer on site (this by the way was on a Saturday). A thorough search failed to reveal the whereabouts of any fuse box of circuit breaker panels, and the conclusion reached that it must be in the office - which was, of course, locked, with a security coded lock on the door.

Someone managed to make contact with (I presume) a council department and eventually a tradesman turned up. Unfortunately he didn't know the code, and after much deliberation decided the only option was to break in. We presume that it was at this point that an alarm of some sort alerted "someone" at some central location, as a phone rang and someone asked what was happening. After much debate the situation was resolved and all restored to normal.

My question is simply this: how can elderly people be left at risk like this without any apparent means of easily and instantly contacting anyone in an emergency? It doesn't take much imagination to realise what could have happened if someone had been taken seriously ill without the emergency alarm being operational.

Where are the Health and Safety people when you REALLY need them?
 
Georges Jurish, Bristol