Water Outages Plague 7K NYC Public Housing Tenants

NEW YORK — Water outages plagued thousands of New York City public housing tenants Thursday as workers scrambled to restore service.

Unplanned outages left more than 7,400 residents of 35 New York City Housing Authority buildings in Brooklyn, The Bronx and Manhattan without water or hot water as of about 10:45 a.m., according to the agency's online dashboard.

The number of affected tenants dwindled to 4,161 by about 5:30 p.m. after workers fixed some of the outages, the dashboard showed. But 11 buildings at Canarsie's Bay View Houses went at least seven hours without hot water, while all 3,196 residents of The Bronx's Marble Hill Houses had been without water service since 8:50 a.m.

NYCHA staffers were working to fix the remaining outages "as quickly as possible" late Thursday afternoon, agency spokesperson Michael Giardina said.

"Providing our residents with uninterrupted services continues to be the top priority at NYCHA," Giardina said in a statement. "In fact, some service interruptions have already been restored."

Other developments have gone longer without the crucial utilities this week. NYCHA took 69 hours to fix a water outage that affected 100 tenants in an East Harlem building starting Monday afternoon, the housing authority's dashboard showed. Another 231 people at Brooklyn's Red Hook West development went 53 hours without water from Tuesday morning until workers fixed the problem.

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.

"We hope these outages aren’t a harbinger of what to expect when cold weather arrives next month," Legal Aid spokesperon Redmond Haskins said in a statement. "NYCHA has a legal obligation to ensure that these utilities are properly functioning year-round, and when that promise is broken, the Housing Authority must face consequences and issue abatements to impacted residents."

Legal Aid lawyers filed an appeal Tuesday in their lawsuit to get NYCHA tenants rent rebates for the heat failures they endured during the freezing winter of late 2017 and early 2018. 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.