UK resident home owners on BBC
BRITISH residents of Pissouri village in the South whose homes have been destroyed by disastrous land slippage featured on the BBC’s Inside Out programme shown on Monday.
Retirees Kayt and her husband Peter Field, a former army colonel, contacted the BBC in desperation after six years of toing and froing, bounced between the local government and officials, with no action being taken to counter the land slippage that has caused destruction of homes and roads since 2012, and no compensation offered.
The Fields, who were one of several couples appearing on the programme, said that the affected home owners felt abandoned by the Greek Cypriot government and that lives had been ruined.
“We were evicted in March 2015, with no interaction with the officials at all. They just slapped a notice on our door that our home was not fit to live in. No help was offered and no care for people was shown,” Mrs Field said.
The Fields and others are hoping that highlighting the predicament might prompt the South’s government to show a humanitarian approach, and some sort of care and concern towards stricken residents.
They recalled how cracks appeared in their dream home a few years ago, and like other buildings in the area, their house has now split apart. Walls are bowed, roofs collapsed and gardens and pools are destroyed.
The Fields purchased their four-bedroom villa with a substantial garden and pool in 1993. The pair are now having to rent a property nearby and watch their much-loved home disintegrate before their eyes.
Various experts have found that the homes that were sold to them, were built on a “slow moving landslide”, something that the Greek Cypriot government has yet to formally accept, Mrs Field said.
Sixty properties with cracks in the walls as well as 14 houses and a complex of 28 apartments have all been seriously affected. In 2015, several property owners came together to form the Pissouri Housing Initiative Group (PHIG)
Home owners, Antony and Penelope Walker, are members and said that PHIG has paid out thousands of euros to obtain studies and papers from various renowned international experts and also satellite imaging, which measures the movement.
“According to the imaging of our area, it is moving up to 40cm per year, this is a lot when it’s pressing against your house,” Mr Walker said.
Despite assurances from ministers that the state would help and solutions would be found nothing has happened.
In 2015, the former interior minister, Socrates Hasikos, announced plans to put measures in place that could resolve the problem at a cost of 20 million euros, to be paid for by the government,
The Limassol District Office has since said that this offer was made “without the district offices” go-ahead, said Mr Walker.
“It’s like being in a revolving door and we are being given the run around. I’m not entirely sure why the local authority won’t accept the findings. It seems the district office is trying to quash everything we are trying to do,” he said.