House partially collapses in West Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Hazel Lee-Taylor was asleep at 5 a.m. Tuesday.
"Next thing I know, 'Boom!' That's when everything came right down," she told Action News.
She was suddenly startled awake as the facade of her home in the 7000 block of Lincoln Drive in West Mt. Airy crumbled to the ground.
"I sat straight up and looked," she added. "When I looked, I could see straight outside."
Spilling out the home where her grandchildren grew up and where she has lived for 19 years were wooden beams, stone, drywall, her shoes, purses and her attic organized with personal items.
Miraculously, Lee-Taylor and her granddaughter escaped the home unharmed.
And even amidst the all the destruction, they were keeping a positive attitude.
"I know things happen for our own good," she said. "We don't know why things happen, but it is what it is."
"Her thought is like, 'God makes a way, any way,'" said her granddaughter, Mahlaya Rose. "She's very positive."
Lee-Taylor said there was work going on in the newly purchased, vacant twin adjoining her home. She told us she began to notice cracks in her walls.
"(On) every level there were cracks, and they were widening," she said. "I was going to have someone do spackling, taping, that kind of thing. But then I was saying, 'Oh, this is getting too big there. Something else is going on over there.'"
But she never expected something like this.
As her insurance company and workers from the Philadelphia Department of License and Inspections assess the property and work to determine what led to the collapse, she told us she is putting put her future in the hands of her Higher Power.
"It's just okay," she said. "It's His way of saying I need to move on."
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