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BOUNTIFUL — The recent series of storms have forced some Bountiful residents out of their apartments. For renters who live in the Green Leaf apartment complex, 453 W. 1500 South, the past several days have been a nightmare.
The roof over one of the buildings at the complex needs repair, and the plastic tarp covering it hasn't been enough to protect residents from the wind and rain. One tenant has a big hole in his bedroom ceiling.
"This is my room, and this is what we woke up to," Scott Bromley explained in a home video he shot at 4:00 Tuesday morning.
It was like water works inside Bromley's apartment. The video shows water leaking from his bedroom ceiling. Bromley then shows water leaking in the bathroom and the hallway too.
In Bromley's bedroom, the heavy water weighed down the ceiling, forming a big bubble. He poked a hole in it to drain the water.
"Within minutes after I did that, the rest of the sheetrock just fell," Bromley said.
As he dealt with that problem, the rain continued to fall. "From 4:30 this morning ‘til noon, I was changing five-gallon buckets of water every two to three minutes in the bathtub, keeping up with the water," he said.
Bromley says the apartment managers were slow to address the problem, which actually started the previous week.
On April 21, strong winds ripped the air conditioning unit off the roof of Bromley's building. He says maintenance workers took out part of the roof and covered it with a tarp. But the wind and rain on Easter night blew the tarp, sending rain inside the bedroom of Bromley's 4-year-old son.
"(I) came in here, flipped on the light and saw, right here, there was constant water stream; and his mattress and bed was soaking right where his head was," Bromley said.
Amanda Carson, who lives next door, had 2 inches of standing water in her bathroom Tuesday morning. She says if the managers had fixed the roof sooner, that wouldn't have happened.
"It's a horrible smell in here, and that's not us," Carson said. "I know the bathrooms aren't pretty, but that's not us."
Carson spent Tuesday helping Bromley move out of his apartment and into a unit in another building. Bromley says this fiasco has cost him to miss three days of work.
"It's dry now, and (if) we get another four days of rain, who's to say what's going to happen?" Bromley said.
The tenants who live across from Bromley also had to move out Tuesday.
The manager of the Green Leaf Apartments declined to go on camera, but she said tenant safety is her priority. She said the insurance adjusters are getting a second bid for the roof repair, and it will be fixed after that.
Email: syi@ksl.com
