6,500 NYCHA Apartments Lose Heat As Snowstorm Lashes NYC

NEW YORK, NY — More than 6,500 New York City Housing Authority apartments were left in the cold Thursday as a powerful storm slammed the city with snow and high winds. Six entire NYCHA developments housing more than 15,000 people — the Rutland Towers, Pink Houses and Tilden Houses in Brooklyn, the Woodside Houses in Queens and the Patterson and Sedgwick Houses in the Bronx — lost heat, hot water or both at some point on Thursday, according to NYCHA's online outage dashboard.

The utilities were back online at all but five NYCHA buildings as of 5:15 p.m. Thursday evening, the dashboard showed.

The outages started Thursday morning as a powerful winter storm that Mayor Bill de Blasio called "very, very serious" slammed the city with heavy snow and winds as strong as 50 MPH. A blast of Arctic air threatened to push temperatures to dangerously cold lows Thursday night through Saturday.

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Kelly Brockington and her five children were still trying to warm up their apartment at the Tilden Houses in Brownsville on Thursday evening. They had the oven on and a pot of boiling water on the stove to wash up with instead of the cold water coming out of the faucets, she said.

"It’s going to be really cold tonight and the water is lukewarm or it’s freezing cold," Brockington said.

The 1,300 apartments at the Woodside Houses went without heat and hot water from 11:15 a.m. until after 4 p.m. Low gas pressure entering a boiler there cause the problem, NYCHA press secretary Jasmine Blake said.

The 1,789 apartments at the Patterson Houses lost heat as of just after 2 p.m., according to NYCHA's dashboard. Heat had gone out there earlier Thursday morning but had been restored, Blake said.

The Sedgwick Houses in Morris Heights, a development housing nearly 1,500 people in 783 apartments, had lost heat as of about 3:40 p.m. Thursday. Two other buildings at a smaller complex in the South Bronx also reported heat problems Thursday afternoon.

The 996 apartments at Tilden Houses, the nearly 1,500 units at the Pink Houses in East New York and the Rutland Towers in East Flatbush all lost heat and hot water Thursday afternoon. Outages ranged from less than an hour to roughly two hours.

Some 108 apartments in a building at East Harlem's Jefferson Houses and 22 apartments at a Lower East Side building also suffered gas outages Thursday morning, NYCHA General Manager Michael Kelly said at a news conference. The Lower East Side tenants lacked both heat and hot water while only hot water is out at the East Harlem building. Another building on the Upper West Side also lost hot water Thursday afternoon.

The strength of the so-called bomb cyclone storm "went way past anyone's expectations, so the pressure on the boiler systems was put to another degree," Blake said.

The impacted apartments may have had low heat and likely never dipped below the legally required temperature of 68 degrees, Blake said, as many NYCHA buildings are dense and retain heat well.

Thursday wasn't the first time Brockington had heat problems in her apartment. Hot water has been going in and out there since October, she said. One of her young sons even got sick after bathing in cold water without her knowing, she said.

"It’s just always one thing after another with this complex," Brockington said.

Officials blamed the outages on NYCHA's aging, long-neglected infrastructure that it can't afford to replace. Most of the authority's buildings are at least half a century old and its oldest functioning boiler dates to the 1950s, Blake said.

"Notwithstanding that reality, each time we've got to get the heat back on and we've got to take whatever extraordinary actions will allow us to get the heat back on," de Blasio said.

Thousands of tenants at the Redfern Houses in Far Rockaway, Queens, along with other complexes in Brooklyn and Hell's Kitchen, shivered without heat on Wednesday as the storm bore down, the New York Daily News reported.

NYCHA brought a mobile boiler to the Redfern Houses on Wednesday to restore heat there, Kelly said.

The housing authority recently put extra staffers to work around the clock to fix boilers that go out, Blake said. Workers addressed 10,000 heat-related work orders just last weekend, she said. Some particularly troublesome boilers are under 18- or 24-hour watches.

But Brockington said de Blasio and NYCHA need to replace the failing boilers before the problem gets worse.

"Something has to give," she said.

Lead image by Kathleen Culliton