Heat Fails For 5,500 NYCHA Tenants On Frigid Day

NEW YORK — More than 5,500 public housing tenants lost heat Friday morning as New York City braced for a weekend freeze, records show.

Unplanned heating outages hit 23 New York City Housing Authority buildings at three developments in The Bronx and Brooklyn as temperatures hovered below 40 degrees, the agency's own online dashboard showed at about 11 a.m.

The heat failures came ahead of a blast of cold weather that's expected to drive the mercury below 30 degrees early Saturday morning with wind chills in the low 20s.

The outages should be repaired by late Friday afternoon, NYCHA spokesperson Barbara Brancaccio said. But one advocacy group said the breakdowns highlight the need to replace aging boiler systems in the city's public housing before even more frigid weather arrives this winter.

"We hope today isn’t a precursor for what to expect this winter, and call on our leaders in government to act now," Legal Aid Society spokesperson Redmond Haskins said in a statement.

A broken water main in a boiler room knocked out heat and hot water for all 4,825 tenants of The Bronx's Castle Hill Houses at about 6:45 a.m. Friday, the housing authority said. The outage should be fixed at 5 p.m. as plumbers work to connect a water station at the site, Brancaccio said.

Another outage killed heat and hot water at 7 a.m. at Fiorentino Plaza, a smaller complex of eight buildings housing 462 residents in East New York, according to NYCHA. National Grid workers found the boiler flooded and staffers are working to remove the water, Brancaccio said, adding that service should be restored at 4 p.m.

Another 257 tenants of one building at Williamsburg's Independence Towers lost heat shortly before 9 a.m., records show. The breakdown, which should be fixed at 4 p.m., was caused by a leak in an apartment that affected the building's heat service supply, Brancaccio said.

In addition to the heat breakdowns, one building housing 345 people at the Farragut Houses in Downtown Brooklyn lost hot water, while another 12 tenants at Bed-Stuy's Stuyvesant Gardens I development were without water service, the dashboard says.

NYCHA's persistent heat failures were part of the reason the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development appointed an independent monitor to oversee the agency this year. About eight in 10 public housing tenants lost heat from late 2017 into early 2018, failures that led Legal Aid to sue for rent breaks.

The monitor, Bart M. Schwartz, announced a plan this week to install 108 new boilers at 25 developments using $450 million in state funding. That list does not include the developments suffering outages Friday.

"This is a remarkable first step towards dramatically improving the lives of NYCHA residents," housing authority Chairman and CEO Greg Russ said in a statement Thursday.