Steaming fury
Pol: NYCHA misleads on ceiling collapse
THE PUBLIC housing tenants injured when their living room ceiling collapsed appear to be among the many victims of NYCHA’s failed heating systems.
City Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) says a manager of the city Housing Authority told him the underlying cause of the collapse appears to be the fault of the building’s boiler.
NYCHA has come under fire for a systemic collapse of boilers that has caused heat outages for 320,000 tenants since Oct. 1.
But Torres notes the authority made no mention of boilers as the cause when on Jan. 12 the ceiling fell in on Daniel Jeter, 24, and his girlfriend, Tytahnisha Moulterie, 22, in their apartment at Weeksville Gardens in Brooklyn.
“This is yet another example of NYCHA failing to be transparent,” said Torres, who as chairman of the Council’s Oversight and Investigation Committee grilled NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye about the heat system failures at a hearing last week.
On Friday, Torres sent a letter to city Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters and NYCHA Inspector General Ralph Iannuzzi requesting that they open an inquiry into whether the authority tried to hide the cause of the incident.
Torres says after the Weeksville Gardens collapse, he requested a meeting with New York City Housing Authority staff to explain what happened. “An official at NYCHA admitted to me in a private conference call on Jan. 26 that the ceiling collapse at Weeksville Gardens, injuring and displacing several tenants, was likely caused not by the underlying condition of the ceiling per se but by a boiler leak,” he wrote.
Torres said the staffer told him there was a buildup of condensation above the ceiling caused by flaws in the Dean St. building’s heat distribution system.
He notes the collapse occurred on a particularly cold day and that the strain on the boiler could have been a contributing factor.
The family has said it has complained to NYCHA about a water leak since January 2017, and that workers made cosmetic fixes but did not address the underlying problem. The family was initially placed in an apartment without furniture.
NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said that on Feb. 2, after several phone inquiries from the authority, the family decided they want to return to their Weeksville Gardens unit.
“We have been working with the family to get them settled into a permanent home as quickly as possible,” she said, adding that final repairs to the apartment are expected to be complete within two weeks.