THE CITY THAT NEVER ‘HEATS’?!
Chilly NYCHA outage
Another cold snap, same old NYCHA.
Amid a chilly mid-October and with November on its way, residents at a Brooklyn public housing development went without heat this weekend, getting what they hope won’t be a sneak preview of another winter under NYCHA.
A sewage blockage caused the heat to go down early Friday at the sevenbuilding Sterling Place Rehabs in Crown Heights, making the buildings feel like little shelter at all from the brisk autumn outside.
“It’s not fun. It’s like living outside,” said Dalton Bridgett, 46, a bus driver and tenant in the development. “It’s cold outside, and you’re coming in, and it’s cold in here.”
NYCHA repair workers removed the stoppage on Friday, only to learn that the boiler’s motherboard was fried. With a new motherboard not slated to arrive until later this week, the workers temporarily connected the development’s system to an adjacent heating plant — but that heating plant had a gas outage, requiring National Grid to be called in.
In the meantime, residents were left freezing and fed-up, forced to run expensive space heaters and bundle up in two pairs of socks.
“I have young kids in the house. It shouldn’t be that cold,” said tenant Octavia Howard, 25. “You can’t wash your hair, it’s too cold. I go to the hair salon. I don’t want to get a head cold.”
By late Sunday afternoon, tenants reported that the heat had been restored throughout the complex, which houses 325 people, according to NYCHA records.
But they’re left hoping that this won’t be a sign of things to come with winter on its way and an embattled public housing system already dealing with a litany of issues including toxic lead paint and rat infestations.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams on Monday will call on NYCHA to implement a data system in the style of NYPD’s CompStat to track maintenance complaints in real time.