It’s been over one year since a block of apartments collapsed in Pietà, leaving four families fleeing their homes in the middle of the night.

A magisterial inquiry is underway, and the families are still agitating for justice – but the fact that the construction site next door that could have led to their homes collapse is now a fresh new block of apartments while their home remains rubble is just adding insult to injury.

“It’s been a year since they destroyed our home and threw us into this trauma,” Caroline Micallef, one of the residents whose home collapsed around her, said. “Your building is ready and ours is still broken on the ground, shame on you… if you can even feel shame.”

“Does it not needle at your conscience? We are in the same situation as a year ago, you never helped us, this dragging of feet is truly shameful. We are one year on from when we had our own things, a year on from living a normal life.”

Within weeks of the Pieta’ collapse, more homes collapsed in Gwardamangia and Mellieħa. Somehow, no one was killed in these collapsed – however, that luck couldn’t last, and, more recently, 54-year-old Maltese mother Miriam Pace was killed when her home fell around her in Santa Venera.

Cover photo left: TVM, right: Malta Independent

What do you think of this lack of empathy for the victims left out in the cold?