An Indonesian domestic worker was badly injured after she plummeted seven storeys while allegedly cleaning the windows of her employer’s Carissa Park condominium unit in Tampines yesterday, reported Shin Min Daily News.
According to the Chinese daily, it is believed that she lost her balance and fell to the terrace of a neighbor’s ground floor unit. Photos of the scene were snapped by an eyewitness.
Her employer, who did not want to be named, told the newspaper that her maid had only been working in Singapore for a month. Apparently, only an elderly woman was present at home during the time of the incident.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force confirmed to The Straits Times that it sent an ambulance to 2 Flora Drive at 12:05pm on Tuesday, and a woman in her 20s was taken to Changi General Hospital, where medical staff were on standby to receive her.
No word on her updated condition as of writing. Coconuts will update this story when more information becomes available.
Separately, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) had actually released a statement in June 2012 for employers of foreign domestic workers (FDW) regarding this issue. The authority said that from January to June that year, there were nine work-related FDW fall from heights fatalities, compared to four cases in 2011.
So with immediate effect, MOM declared that employers of FDWs were banned from allowing their employees clean the exterior of windows — unless strict safety conditions were in place. These two conditions include having an adult present for supervision and installing window grilles that are locked at all times during the cleaning process.
It seems like the last time a foreign domestic worker fell to her death from an HDB flat while cleaning the windows was in December last year, when an Indonesian maid died one day after she fell from a third-storey unit, according to The Straits Times. Her death was recorded as an “unfortunate misadventure” by the state coroner, and the employer was placed on a blacklist.
In 2015, The New Paper reported that the stricter rules implemented by MOM in 2012 resulted in a significant decrease in cases of maids falling to their deaths while cleaning the windows of HDB flats.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect previous cases that happened and MOM’s ban.
