Vol. 80/No. 34      September 12, 2016

 

Residents in deadly Maryland explosion point to landlord, city

 
SILVER SPRINGS, Md. — “The explosion that destroyed part of this complex, killing seven people and forcing over 100 into homelessness Aug. 10, could easily have been prevented,” Glova Scott, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in the District of Columbia, told workers she met going door to door at the Flower Branch apartments here Aug. 21.

Shortly before midnight, an explosion and fire tore through 14 apartments. The National Transportation and Safety Board is probing the blast. NTSB investigator Ravi Chhatre told the Washington Post it will take a year.

Residents say they smelled gas in the building weeks before the explosion. Adriene Boye, who lived in the complex, reported it to the property management. They did nothing. He called 911 emergency services July 25. “They came and told us it smelled like incense,” and they left, he told NBC News.

“The landlord just cared about his rent and the government didn’t do anything at all,” Scott said.

Yamileth Reyes told Scott and SWP campaigners that she knows something about disasters like this. She moved to the U.S. after Hurricane Mitch destroyed her home in Honduras in 1998.

“The rulers and the press say these are ‘natural disasters.’ But they are social catastrophes caused by capitalist social relations, and they happen far too often, from Katrina in New Orleans to the flooding in Baton Rouge today,” Scott said. “That’s why the Socialist Workers Party campaigns to build a movement of millions that can take political power out of the hands of the capitalists and put it into the hands of the working class, to reorganize society on new moral and social values.”
 
 
Related articles:
Flood disaster in Louisiana is product of bosses’ greed
‘Natural’ disasters are result of capitalist profit drive
 
 
 
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