Lower East Side Housing Tenants 'Ecstatic' to Have Most Gas Pipes Repaired

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — Several low-income residents in the Lower East Side breathed a sigh of relief Tuesday afternoon when Con Edison turned on the sixth and seventh lines of the nine gas pipes that had been out of commission in their building.

Earlier this month, Patch reported that in 131 Broome St. — a Section 8 housing complex that's part of the Grand Street Guild in the Lower East Side, and is co-owned by the city and the Archdiocese of New York — had been suffering from a gas outage since Sept. 2.

Sandra Strother, vice president of the Grand Street Guild Residents Association and a tenant at 131 Broome St., told Patch on Tuesday that she was "ecstatic," but that the tenants still had a lot of work to do.

"I am absolutely ecstatic they turned on the gas today, but things are definitely not over for us," Strother said.

Two gas lines out of nine were still in the process of being repaired Tuesday, and the plumbers told tenants the pipes would take at least another month to fix. About 20 residents remain without gas to their apartments.

Many of the building's residents are senior citizens, shut-ins, people with chronic health problems and families with several small children — people for whom more than a month without gas is potentially life threatening.

Strother said she has been working with plumbers for 12-hour days for the past week to fix the building's gas pipes, but in the mean time, many ceilings and walls are cracked open, and dust and debris are everywhere.

"With a problem from September leading into October, it may seem like an eternity for the customers," Con Ed spokesperson Sidney Alvarez told Patch Tuesday. "But what customers need to understand is the first priority is safety, we don't want explosion to happen."

Strother said Con Ed told her Tuesday morning that they didn't have the "manpower" to come turn on the gas pipes that had been repaired for weeks. She made several calls to local elected officials, and hours later, Con Ed came to turn on the gas in the repaired pipes.

Even though the problem in 131 Broome St. is close to solved, two buildings in the same housing complex as 131 Broome St. have the same gas pipe infrastructure and the same imminent danger of gas leaks, Strother said. Her next priority is working with those buildings to get their pipes repaired as well.

Strother first smelled gas in her building in March, she told Patch. She called the fire department, and Con Ed shut down the gas pipe that led to the lobby — effectively shutting off the building's laundry machines for six months.

When Con Ed workers returned on Sept. 2 to re-open the gas line, Strother said, they noticed other pipes were leaking, so they shut gas to the entire building. They found that the glue that held the pipes together had eroded because it hadn't been replaced since the building was built in the 1970s.

In the weeks since Sept. 2, plumbers have been systematically going into apartments one-by-one — moving the stove away from the wall, breaking a hole through the wall, and then repairing the glue that holds the pipes together, Strother said.

The building's tenants have had to pay for all their own take-out meals while the gas has been off, and they are pushing for rebates from management that are more than the $200-per-apartment rebate management offered them earlier this month.

Strother has been working with several local elected officials to get the residents rent rebates and more meals paid for, as well as accountability from the building's management. Earlier this month, a handful of politicians — New York Sen. Daniel Squadron, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Assembly Member Alice Cancel and Council Member Margaret Chin — wrote a letter to Wavecrest Management, which oversees the building.

"While we appreciate the recently proposed $200 rent credit per apartment, we feel the proposed credit is not enough to offset the hardship that tenants are facing," the letter said. "We urge you to consider additional programs and compensation to address the outage's impact on tenants."

Wavecrest has not responded to the letter, a spokesperson for Squadron told Patch.

Photo credit: Sarah Kaufman/Patch