Thousands Of Residents In Bronx NYCHA Complex Without Heat, Water As Temperatures Drop
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Thousands of people in the Bronx were without heat and water Friday, their frustration rising as the temperature dropped.
Throughout the day, residents in the Castle Hill Houses have been without essential services and it's not the first time.
It's only November and tenants are already fed up. Emotions from freezing all day long had boiled over by Friday night.
"We didn't have heat all day today," Ieshia Hall told CBS2's Jessica Layton. "This is like a daily… always happens in Castle Hill Houses."
Hall and the seven kids who live in the apartment went without water most of the day too.
"We had to buy water to fill the toilet, use bottled water to cook breakfast."
The lack of running water and frigid air was a frustration felt by nearly 5,000 throughout the 14 buildings in this New York City Housing Authority complex.
A note CBS2 found on the ground dated Thursday warned of the interruption. NYCHA claims it was due to a water main break in the boiler room. That repair work just so happened as the temperatures dipped into the low 30s – hours before a freeze warning in New York would go into effect.
"Pay my rent, don't give no problems, I want to be treated like a human," one NYCHA resident said.
"Almost every month it's something new, either with the hot water or the heat," Geraldo Sanchez added.
More than 2,000 people at the Rangel Houses in Harlem also had no heat thanks to an outage nobody there planned for either.
"Now, right now, sometimes we turn on the oven, sometimes. Which is bad because you could die from that but what can you do?" Prince Thomas said.
CBS2 cameras were inside one of the Bronx buildings Friday night as NYCHA workers started knocking on doors – to find out which tenants had heat and water.
"Don't you feel like these people deserve an explanation? Can you explain why it took so long to get the heat back on today?" Jessica Layton asked NYCHA workers.
To the surprise of no one there, the workers wouldn't answer.
"They need to fix it. I understand we don't pay as much as other people, but we deserve it just like anybody else," Hall said.
NYCHA's website shows over the next ten days, it's planning 17 more outages to deal with heat and water issues at multiple complexes.
Some starting Monday. Inconvenient, but at least people can prepare for them.