Thousands Of NYCHA Residents Without Hot Water In Fort Greene

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — More than 4,000 NYCHA residents in Fort Greene's Ingersoll Houses were left without hot water on Wednesday, just one week after the agency struggled to fix outages at 35 other buildings across the city.

The entire 102 Monument Walk development lost hot water around 8 a.m. and was still completely without it by 2 p.m., the city's online dashboard showed. The outage, which was listed as unplanned but officials later said was scheduled, affected 21 buildings, 1,840 units and 4,118 tenants at the complex.

The outages are the latest in a string of service problems that have advocates worried about the housing authority's ability to keep tenants warm through winter.

Last week, more than 7,400 residents of 35 NYCHA buildings were left without hot water.

"Just in the last week, water outages have plagued thousands of NYCHA tenants at developments across New York City, with some outages lasting several days,” said Redmond Haskins, spokesperson for The Legal Aid Society. “As the landlord, NYCHA has a legal obligation to ensure that water and other critical utilities are fully functioning for tenants."

Haskins added that the housing authority should repay tenants with rent abatements when their services aren't delivered. Legal Aid has a lawsuit to get NYCHA tenants rent rebates for the heat failures they endured during the freezing winter of late 2017 and early 2018 pending in court. A Manhattan Supreme Court judge dismissed the case in NYCHA's favor in February, but Legal Aid has asked the Appellate Division court to reverse that decision.

The authority said that the Ingersoll Houses outage was planned in order to test newly-installed boilers and was restored within four hours, although the dashboard listed the outage as unplanned and still showed the 4,118 tenants without hot water until at least 2 p.m. The outage showed up as resolved by 3:30 p.m.

The Ingersoll Houses weren't the only housing complex without hot water Wednesday.

There were also unplanned outages in three Bronx and one Manhattan building, the dashboard showed. Together, those outages left nearly 600 tenants without hot water.

One of the Bronx buildings, like Ingersoll, had their hot water cut early Wednesday morning. But some of the others had been without hot water since Monday afternoon.

Last week, NYCHA took as long as 69 hours to fix water outages in some of the 35 buildings.

The breakdowns came about a month before the Oct. 1 start of the so-called heating season during which NYCHA and all other landlords are required to keep their tenants warm. The housing authority has struggled with widespread heating failures in recent years, one of the many problems that a federal monitor has been tasked with tracking.

The outages sparked concern from the Legal Aid Society about further breakdowns hitting tenants when the weather turns colder.

Patch reporter Noah Manskar contributed to this story.