About 5,000 New Yorkers in an entire public housing complex in the Bronx lost heat or hot water services for hours on the coldest day of the fall.
The NYCHA website indicated that the outage hit the Castle Hill Houses at dawn on Friday. They blamed a broken water main in a boiler room for the disruption while residents shivered in their apartments.
NYCHA reported on Twitter that services were restored at around 6:15 p.m. on Nov. 9.
It’s not the first time residents of the government housing run by the New York Housing Authority have been left in the cold. Such breakdowns have become so common that some keep warm with space heaters or turn on the oven, though they’ve been warned of the dangers.
The New York Post reported a rash of other heating problems at other NYCHA complexes across the city. On Twitter, NYCHA announced Friday night that it had worked to fix issues reported at the Farragut Houses and Stuyvesant Gardens in Brooklyn, and at the Rangel Houses in Manhattan.
One Farragut Houses resident, however, tweeted back at 7:40 a.m. on Nov. 9 that she still did not have heat in her apartment, and was resorting to using pots of water to stay warm.
