Our £25,000 Cuban wedding was ruined as hotel ceiling fell in
A COUPLE’S £25,000 dream wedding in Cuba was ruined when the ceiling of their hotel crashed down on them.
Sarah and John Wenham were both injured, with the groom having to crawl under rubble to try to rescue his bride.
Mrs Wenham, 35, was trapped under the roof along with several other wedding guests while the couple’s two daughters, Mia, nine, and 20-month-old Penny, escaped injury only because their father protected them from the debris.
The bride, of Gravesend in Kent, suffered head and eye injuries, while project manager Mr Wenham fractured two ribs and hurt his spleen.
Other members of the wedding party were left with head and spinal injuries in the incident at the Sol Rio De Luna y Mares Hotel, in the east of Cuba. Mrs Wenham
‘I genuinely thought I was going to die’
said: ‘We were just about to meet with hotel staff to discuss our wedding plans in the lobby, when John pointed out the ceiling as it started to move.
A loud bang followed as the roof then suddenly collapsed and fell upon us, trapping us underneath. The roof debris knocked us clean to the ground.
‘It was so heavy that I couldn’t move under it, and I was terrified because I couldn’t get to my daughters who I could hear screaming from somewhere beneath the debris.
‘I saw the blood start to gush from my head and I genuinely thought in that moment that I was going to die.’
Recalling the moment the ceiling collapsed on August 25 last year, Mr Wenham said he had watched as their wedding day was ruined in ‘one split-second’. The 35-year-old said: ‘When we eventually found Sarah, it took two people to lift the debris off her and I had to crawl underneath and drag her out.
‘We were all traumatised. In one split-second everything we’d planned and saved for so long was gone.’
The couple claimed even before the roof caved in their hotel room had been flooded with sewage, damaging clothes, children’s toys and unopened wedding gifts.
They have since taken legal action against operator Thomas Cook.
Thomas Cook said it had done everything it could to ‘support the Wenham family’.