The wave of heating system breakdowns that’s left public housing tenants shivering in recent days followed a drastic reduction in the number of NYCHA staff fixing boilers, records show.
Over the last four years during Mayor de Blasio’s first term, the number of in-house boiler technicians dropped from 345 in 2013 to the current number of 250, according to Teamsters Local 237, which represents 8,000 NYCHA staff.
That means nearly one in three heat management staff is no longer at NYCHA servicing its aging boilers — a steady attrition Local 237 President Greg Floyd flatly blames for last week’s heating disaster during a record cold snap.
“They don’t have the staff to go around and do the repairs and do the preventive maintenance during the summer when it should be taken care of,” Floyd said. “They’re not doing the work.”
In recent days thousands of tenants all over the city have felt the results.
Pipes have frozen. Boilers have died. NYCHA tenants have found themselves waiting sometimes for days for help to arrive. City Controller Scott Stringer says he’s fielded no-heat calls from 55 developments.
By late Monday 11 developments were enduring heat problems, including entire developments without heat.
At the Sotomayor Houses in the Bronx, tenant Kimberly Abrams, 50, had two bedrooms with zero heat.
“We still have to wear two pajamas, three socks, two T-shirts and a hoodie,” she said. “My next door neighbor is 93 and she has to sleep with three parkas on.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake contested the union’s timeline, and said the Authority’s boiler unit was fully staffed until October, when it lost about 100 boiler technicians who took other Civil Service jobs.
But she insisted that “97% of NYCHA apartments have consistent heat.
“We are seeing chronic issues as certain locations, but the majority have been sufficiently heated throughout this cold spell.”
The number of no-heat calls spiked radically in the last week as the mercury plummeted with 15,039 calls from Dec. 29 through Jan. 2. That compares to 3,659 during the same period last year and 5,838 the year before.
“This is the longest stretch of below-freezing days since 1961, and it has pushed aging equipment to the extreme,” Blake said.
NYCHA officials said in the last week they increased staff to address heat issues, but acknowledge that they’ve lost the skilled workers who know how to fix busted boilers quickly.
“Having those type of vacancies will impact our ability to respond, it impacts our overtime costs,” said Robert Knapp, head of NYCHA’s heat management services department.
Controller Stringer last week launched an audit of the authority’s boiler repair protocols, noting that NYCHA boilers have a failure rate of nearly 40%, compared to 8% for private sector buildings.
Mayor de Blasio said it would take $18 billion to deal with all of NYCHA’s outstanding needs, and argued the temperatures that led to the heat outages were a rarity.
“We had six days in a row of sub-zero temperatures, or sub-freezing temperatures,” he told NY1.
With Jillian Jorgensen
