The Sky is Falling 
The story begins when my husband and I were living in a one bedroom apartment in Takoma Park, Maryland. We weren't yet married and I had been living alone. He was attending Georgetown University and due to many reasons, not the smallest being financial, we decided to move in together.
One Saturday evening, July 11th to be exact as I will never forget that date, we were home making dinner. It should be noted that it was also one of the hottest days of the summer, with the temperature slightly over a hundred degrees. We had one window air conditioner which wasn't able to cool down the whole apartment, but it did bring the overall temperature down into the 90's so it was at least bearable. It was my turn to make dinner and Michael was sitting by the bed, watching T.V. He noticed some dust in the air which seemed to be slowly falling. He glanced up and noticed that the small cracks in the ceiling were noticeable larger. In fact, as he stared at them they seemed to be growing.
From the kitchen I was unaware of any of this. One moment I was making dinner, and the next moment I hear Michael calling to me frantically. I went to him and saw him standing on tip-toe, hands on the ceiling. He said, "I am holding up the ceiling.". I said, "Huh?". I looked up and sure enough, the cracks had grown massive and he was indeed holding up a large section of the ceiling. And the cracks were still growing ever larger. I cried, "What do I do?" as I stood there not fully sure I understood the situation. After all, it is not everyday that a ceiling detaches itself.
He said, "Get everything out of the way!". Ok, I thought, get everything out of the way. Out of the way of the ceiling. The ceiling. That which is above everything. And I have to move everything out from under it? Yeah right!
I frantically tried to pull a few things away to the corners of the room, and grab the cats. Michael was saying, "I can't hold it much longer, it's too heavy". Well, I had never really thought about how much a ceiling weights. Have you? But evidently some ceilings are heavy as Michael can verify. He yelled that he couldn't hold it any longer, but he didn't know what to do to get out from under it. Once he let go it would fall down.I was in the kitchen at this point, which had a different ceiling and more importantly, a ceiling which seemed content to stay where it was.
Frantic and none too desperate, Michael was quickly running out of time. He needed to get out from under the ceiling, but in such a way as to not sustain massive bodily harm. Since this particular ceiling was above our bed, Michael was at the foot of it holding the ceiling up when he spied the loft. Quickly making a decision (not that it was hard to choose between certain death and possible life), he dove for the bed under the loft, hoping it would shield him from injury. It did.
The ceiling was composed of a 2 inch thick plaster lath. Since we had the top floor apartment, there was blown fiberglass above that for insulation. It all came crashing down. The picture above was taken after we had carted away the huge chunks of plaster.
The scariest part of the ordeal was probably the aftermath. Not the cleanup - that was just tedious. The scariest part was the realization of what could have happened. You see, when the ceiling fell it didn't just fall straight down. One side detached first and that came swinging down like a pendulum. When it reached the peak of its arc swinging, the other side then decided to become detached and the whole piece then came crashing down. Due to this, the ceiling more or less fell upside down. That is, the smooth painted side which had been above our heads for so long was now on top, and the plaster side with all the nails sticking out of it to keep it nailed to the rafters was now on the bottom.
The bottom, or underside, is what came crashing down. The nails embedded into whatever they landed on, which was most of our stuff. Since the ceiling was above our bed, it fell down on the part of the bed not protected by the loft (much to Michael's relief), the nails puncturing the blankets, sheets, and mattress.
We spent much time with pliers in hand trying to pry nails out of the floor and other personal objects. The scary part is now more obvious perhaps. If the ceiling had decided to wait 4 or 5 hours before falling, we would have been sleeping snugly in bed, unaware that we were about to be skewered from above.
Even scarier is the thought that our two cats normally sleep at the foot of our bed and they would have been in the direct path of the falling debris. I can't imagine that they would have survived. The loft would have protected our heads and upper chests, but from the stomach on down we would have been exposed. I don't even know that Michael and I would have survived, with all those nails. I am sure we would have suffered some ugly wounds.
What if we had been at work when the ceiling collapsed? If the cats had managed to avoid the falling debris, they would then be wandering around all day in the fiberglass, cleaning themselves to get it off, and thus ingesting it. Not a pleasant prospect either.
Michael and I both agree that it is best that it happened while we were at home, though we can't say that to this day we don't look at ceilings with trepidation.
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Robin/ceiling_collapse.html
The Crack
The most frightening thing happened the morning of June 27, 2007…
but let me back up a little bit, first.
About 5 days previous, my daughter Kelly came to me and said, “I don’t mean to freak you out, Mom...but there’s a crack in my ceiling and it looks like it’s going to cave in.” Being the non-alarmist of the family, i sent her to talk to her father about it.
When i spoke with Paul after he checked it out, he said that she definitely had a crack in her ceiling and that it was probably due to the foundation shifting or something and that there was no risk of it “caving in“. We’d been debating how to handle this for days...his ideas have ranged from spackling it to sheet-rocking over it. I’d been lobbying for tearing it down and re-sheet rocking the whole thing.
Back to June 27th, 2007...i had just gotten out of the shower and was opening the door when i heard this horrendous crash and Kelly calling me. The noise got worse and i rushed to open the door to her room only to be stopped by debris on the floor. I could see in just enough to watch as the rest of Kelly’s ceiling collapsed onto her as she huddled on the floor against her bed. Once the entire ceiling was down, she pushed through the debris and ran out of her room. Patrick and Jax were still in bed but heard the commotion so they came running. Evidently, i was screaming and so was Kelly!!!
Kelly said that she was half asleep and heard a noise and looked up to see a new crack growing perpendicular to the existing crack. The one side of her ceiling fell down and she rolled off her bed in the opposite direction and covered her head. That’s when she called out to me. She also told me that she’d had her ceiling fan on all night and awoke about 5AM to see sparks coming from it so she turned it off.
When the ceiling fell, the fan was hanging from one wire with several severed ones around it. We immediately had an electrician friend come up to make sure the wiring was dead in the room. The insurance adjuster came a day later. Both the electrician and the adjuster were flabbergasted....said they’d never seen anything like that.
There was absolutely no sign of moisture so that wasn’t a factor. So...Kelly’s nightstand, bookcase, TV and many other items are ruined...as well as her mattress being filled with construction dust. It was days before we’d gone in there to survey the full scope of the damage because it upset Kelly too much.
I guess for someone who doesn’t practice her faith, i lean on it pretty heavily. I am so thankful that Kelly wasn’t hurt more seriously. She had a nasty bruise on her right shoulder, some cuts and scrapes on her back and a nice goose egg on her head. I can’t imagine what her condition would be if she hadn’t been awake or if the first chunk to fall was directly over her???
If you notice from the pictures, you will see the chunk that fell directly onto her pillow. When the debris was hauled away and weighed at the dump, we learned that 780 pounds of lath and plaster had fallen onto my girl!
Paul and I were both horrified by what happened. I know that Paul was feeling particularly bad about this whole event because he so grossly miscalculated the possibilities of that first “crack“.
The structural engineer concluded that the lath and plaster ceiling simply became too much burden for the nails that had been holding it up for 70 years (yes, I said NAILS). We had the most comprehensive homeowner’s insurance available in the state of NY and we received not one red cent in coverage. The insurance adjuster somehow decided that this was due to “normal wear and tear” and not brought about by any “peril“...therefore releasing the responsibility from the insurance company and onto the consumer, us.
This is the pile that Kelly crawled out from under when it was over!