Elderly woman injured badly after tripping over uneven footpath

In yet another example of just how bad footpaths in the City are, an elderly woman was injured badly when she fell flat on her face after tripping over stones jutting out from an uneven footpath opposite St Joseph’s College of Commerce on Brigade Road.

Elsie Noronha, 63, a resident of Richmond Road, paid a heavy price for losing her balance. She had to cancel her scheduled air travel to Houston, US, on Tuesday.

Noronha said she was walking home after attending the church when she tripped over the footpath around 7.45 pm.

“I couldn’t notice the stone jutting out and tripped over it. I fell flat on my face and went blank for a few minutes. Only when two passersby helped me get up did I realise that I was bleeding from the nose and there were bruises all over the face,” she recounted to Deccan Herald.

“The way blood was oozing out of my nose I thought it was completely broken. Luckily, a friend and his wife, who were passing by, saw me and dropped me home.”

Noronha’s family members then took her to a hospital. “Doctors said the fall has caused several injuries. I suffered from compression in the neck, heavy bleeding from nose and bruises on the entire face. I underwent a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of my brain and a CT scan of my neck. Fortunately, there wasn’t any internal injury,” she added.

Noronha said she lost lakhs of rupees as she had to cancel a scheduled flight to Houston to visit her daughter and granddaughters.

“I had run around for a visa and now everything has gone down the drain. I’m not worried about the money but I don’t want someone else to have a similar experience,” she said. People living in the Central Business District want footpaths to be maintained well. But despite repeated complains to civic authorities, no action has been taken yet, they say.

Previous accidents
A few months ago, Marisa, a nun in charge of the St Paul’s media centre on Richmond Road, suffered three factures on the right leg after falling into a pit on a footpath on Museum Road. She had to walk around with a plaster cast on her leg for over a month.

“There are some pipes lying on the footpath right outside the centre. Despite complaining to the authorities, there has been no action. The footpaths are so uneven that it’s commonplace to see people tripping over them. The whole footpath around the St Patrick’s Church is in a bad condition and posing danger to the walkers,” she said.

Poor streetlights make the walk on the uneven pavements even more dangerous, said a worker at the centre, who didn’t want to be named.

As if uneven footpaths are not enough, motorists riding on them force pedestrians to walk on the road instead, endangering their lives. Riding on footpaths loosens the stones as they cannot bear the weight, Noronha said.