Donisha Ingram, Gleaner Writer
This huge boulder narrowly missed hitting the Richards' home in Point Hill, St. Catherine, when it rumbled down the hillside after a period of heavy rainfall earlier this year. - IAN ALLEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
POINT HILL residents say it is nothing short of a miracle. And they speak in reverential tones of the day when a large, hefty boulder, dislodged from a nearby hill during a landslide, narrowly missed smashing the residence of the Richards family in the Store Hill district of the community.
"An angel rolled away the stone," Mr. Winston Richards, the patriarch of the family, said simply.
And most of the community could agree with that other-worldly assessment.
The landslide had occurred in the days following the passage of the Hurricane Wilma. Residents of the community theorise that the continuous rainfall had soaked the earth and dislodged the rock that rolled towards the Richards' family home like a gloomy armageddon.
"Mi no know how the rockstone manage fi miss the house, 'cause mi see it just a roll towards it, and mi seh to miself, 'dem dead now', mi no know, dem lucky bad," one neighbour confided to Across the Nation.
But there may be a higher power acting in this situation other than mere luck. The Richards family had been forewarned in a dream that Mrs. Enid Richards had the night before.
According to Mr. Richards, his wife went to her bed and dreamt that a truck had ran off the road on to her house.
PRAYER MEETING
"She took this seriously and decided that at the first sight of dawn she would have a prayer meeting then move on with the day's activities. The day was shaping out to be a normal one until 7:05 a.m. when we felt a very heavy shaking," he explained.
The large boulder situated above their house got dislodged from the earth and plummeted towards them! However, instead of making a head-on collision with the house, the boulder took a parallel path, removed everything in its way and stopped beside the house.
The size of the stone is more than the size of half of the house.
When this correspondent visited the Richards' home, his first words were "mercy plead for me".
And the Richards' family thank God still for their miracle in Point Hill.
