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Housing Agency’s Flaws Revealed by Storm

Steven Dent, who lives in Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, suffered carbon monoxide poisoning after he used the oven to heat his apartment.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Three weeks after Hurricane Sandy, fresh teams of federal disaster recovery workers rushed to Coney Island to solve a troubling mystery: few people were signing up for federal financial aid. The workers trooped into the city’s public housing towers, climbing up darkened stairwells, shouting “FEMA,” knocking on doors.

What they found surprised even these veteran crews.

Dozens of frail, elderly residents and others with special needs were still stranded in their high-rise apartments — even though life in much of New York City had returned to near normal. In apartment 8F of one tower, Daniel O’Neill, a 75-year-old retired teacher who uses a wheelchair and who still lacked reliable electricity, cut in half the dosage of his $132-a-month medicine, which he needed to stabilize his swollen limbs.

“That leg looks like it could turn into gangrene,” said Eric Phillipson, a United States Army Ranger turned planner for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, promising to alert the Red Cross as he handed Mr. O’Neill a FEMA aid flier and hurried to the next apartment.

Hurricane Sandy put few agencies in the region to a more daunting test than it did the New York City Housing Authority — the nation’s biggest public landlord — as 402 of its buildings housing 77,000 residents lost electricity and elevators, with most of them also losing heat and hot water. These lifelines were cut in some of the city’s most isolated spots, like Coney Island, Red Hook and the Rockaways.

An examination by The New York Times has found that while the agency moved aggressively before the storm to encourage residents to leave, particularly those who were disabled and the needy, both it and the city government at large were woefully unprepared to help its residents deal with Hurricane Sandy’s lingering aftermath.

The city, which did not enforce its mandatory evacuation order, could not assess the medical needs of residents stuck atop darkened, freezing towers until nearly two weeks after the storm. It relied on ragtag bands of volunteers who quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the task of reaching, comforting and caring for trapped residents. And the seemingly simplest things, like towing portable lighting towers into the Red Hook public housing complex, took 11 days, all because the housing authority had not properly prepared for a major disaster.

Again and again, city officials publicly predicted that the crisis in public housing was on the verge of being resolved, contributing to a perception at City Hall that there was no need to mobilize an extensive effort to provide medical care.

“By tonight or tomorrow, every one of their buildings will have electricity and by early next week they will all have heat,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Nov. 9 — a promise that was off by more than a week. “So that’s a group that we did have to worry about but now do not have to worry about.”

For many, the situation was becoming increasingly dire as residents fell ill from carbon-monoxide-spewing stoves, waited for a knock on the door from a volunteer bearing rations of food and water, or groped down darkened stairs.

“We only had one flashlight,” said Rachel Gonzalez, 57, who fell while going down the pitch-black stairs of her Coney Island building with her husband a week after the storm on a fruitless expedition to Pathmark: it had run out of bottled water and batteries. It was only after volunteers raised alarms that the city began a military-scale response to address the increasingly apparent needs, and while just one death was reported in those buildings in the weeks after the storm — a man who fell down a wet stairwell — city officials said they expected the health effects from the prolonged recovery to linger for several months.

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Many public housing complexes, including this one in Brooklyn, were without power and heat for weeks after the storm.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, echoing comments by many other officials, said that city workers, emergency personnel and contractors deserved praise for their tireless efforts to help those in need. But it is also clear to him that the housing authority could have, and should have, done better.

“Nycha was underprepared,” Mr. Markowitz said. “Senior citizens and the disabled were especially impacted by the lack of essential services available in Sandy’s aftermath, as they were effectively held hostage on the upper floors of their apartment buildings.”

John B. Rhea, a former Wall Street investment banker who took over as the housing authority chairman in 2009, said he regretted the real hardship many public housing residents suffered through — but he said his tenants received more care and attention than those who lived in private buildings, many of which also have large populations of older and infirm residents.

Mr. Rhea and Robert K. Steel, a deputy mayor who oversees the housing authority, said they were proud of the response effort, but agreed some important lessons had been learned.

“If you make a list of 1,000 things we did — we did not do a thousand perfect,” Mr. Steel said. “Should we try to learn from this? Sure.”

Others at City Hall took a far different tack, saying that it was the public housing residents, in many cases, who brought the suffering upon themselves.

“We called for mandatory evacuation,” Howard Wolfson, another deputy mayor, said. “We did not do that assuming that the flood would reach someone on the 10th floor of a building — we did that because of some concern that there could well be outages of power, heat and water. Our hope, expectation and goal is people would leave these buildings.”

Missed Opportunities

Fear of rising sea levels had led the housing authority last year to start warning tenants to prepare a “go bag” to be ready to evacuate in case of a storm. Forty-five percent of the housing authority’s apartment buildings are in low-lying evacuation zones.

“Extreme weather like we’ve seen throughout this year will only become stronger in the future, threatening coastal areas like the Far Rockaways,” Mr. Rhea, the housing authority chairman, said after Tropical Storm Irene threatened to flood housing authority complexes. “Let’s not wait for another hurricane or extreme storm.”

But the housing authority, which has struggled financially as federal financing has shrunk over the last decade, did not heed its own advice.

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Eric Phillipson of FEMA speaking to Daniel O’Neil in Coney Island.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

A 2009 report by the city drafted in response to Hurricane Katrina recommended that the authority elevate certain critical pieces of equipment stored in its basements, renovations that were never done. City officials noted that the floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy reached so high, even the elevated equipment would have been damaged. The agency also did not set up “standby contracts” that would allow the city to quickly secure pumps, generators or other supplies and equipment in an emergency. Such contracts are common in federal disaster planning protocols, although they often come at a price as companies charge a fee to reserve generators or other gear.

But the need for such equipment became painfully apparent the day after Hurricane Sandy hit. Around the city, 26 of the housing authority’s basement boiler rooms had flooded, destroying the equipment there, and leaving 34,565 apartments without heat and hot water. The electrical systems of many buildings, already in marginal shape because of delayed maintenance, were also devastated by flooding. Having power restored would not be enough: in about 95 buildings, temporary generators and boilers would be needed until the electrical systems could be rebuilt.

Water stopped flowing in many high-rise buildings above the sixth floor. Stairwells and hallways were pitch black. But because there was no up-to-date survey of electrical needs, the Army Corps of Engineers, called in to help install generators five days after the storm, first had to visit 100 authority buildings simply to determine what kind of generator each needed.

The Kentucky-based company Ware Inc, which provides temporary boiler rentals, was asked for help on Nov. 2 — four days after the storm, said Steve Taylor, an executive. The company searched nationwide for available boilers, and it took another week before all the boilers were delivered, some from as far as Texas.

Even after the boilers arrived in the city, installing them took more time than it should have. Mr. Taylor, who flew to New York to help, said city officials repeatedly attempted to reuse motors damaged in the flood, something he knew was not going to work.

“Two or three days passed, and we were burning up a lot of motors that they thought would run,” Mr. Taylor said. “We were chasing each other around.”

City officials said there was no way around the slow start-up: simply drying out the basements had taken nearly six days, in spots like the Red Hook housing complex, where the ground was so saturated that the basement had to be repeatedly pumped out. And Mr. Taylor agreed once the work got under way, the city pushed it hard, assigning so many contractors to the job, there was physically no more space on the ground for more personnel to be added.

Incomplete Plans

As much of a struggle as it was to restore services, the city’s effort to get food and medical help to those trapped — and even grasp just how many people were in peril — was even more fraught.

It began with good intentions: three days after the storm, on Nov. 1, the city enlisted a half-dozen nonprofit groups to conduct a formal canvass of high-rise buildings in the flood zone. The city had solid evidence that the needs in these towers were most likely great: only 6,800 people had shown up at shelters citywide, even though 375,000 lived in the mandatory evacuation zone, including 45,000 from public housing.

But the city had no standing agreement with the groups to conduct such a door-to-door effort, or explicit protocols for how it should take place, and many of the teams were sent out without escort by the National Guard, which meant they were unable to gain access to many buildings, said Linda I. Gibbs, another deputy mayor.

“It was not as strong as we thought it needed to be,” she said of this initial effort. “We needed to stand up a more deliberate effort, so we could get access.”

On November 5, as the subway system returned to service and schools in New York City reopened, Mr. Bloomberg was feeling confident that the Housing Authority had a handle on the situation in its buildings. “We may be able to surprise everybody over the next two, three, four days and get everybody, or almost everybody, back,” Mr. Bloomberg said at City Hall.

But Rueben McLaughlin, a science teacher from Public School 329 in Coney Island, which was flooded by the storm, saw the next day just how desperate the situation was. He was among several hundred teacher volunteers who were off for Election Day and who, flashlights in hand, visited public housing complexes to see how their students, their families and other tenants were doing.

Climbing the stairs at Surfside Gardens apartment building, towers operated by the housing authority a few blocks from his school, Mr. McLaughlin said he was startled as he went higher and higher in the tower: there were tenants in wheelchairs who had no way of getting downstairs, diabetics who needed insulin, others who were simply short on food or using stoves to stay warm.

“I was kind of heartbroken,” said Mr. McLaughlin, as he worked with other teachers to fill out one-page sheets on the residents he visited that detailed medical needs or other issues they had. “To see people hurting and not getting the help they needed.”

City Councilman Domenic M. Recchia, Jr., who represents Coney Island, said so many tenants appeared to have medical needs that he helped arrange for a fleet of ambulances and emergency personnel to respond the next day.

Tempers flared as local elected officials, like City Councilman Stephen Levin of Brooklyn, sought accurate predictions for how long utilities would be out, and why there was not a more concerted effort to assist residents. “It is an insane way to handle a crisis,” Mr. Levin said of the initial response.

What was becoming clear was that the city, and its state and federal partners, were ready for the immediate push — with stockpiles of food and water — but had failed to account for what would happen in the days and weeks after the storm passed.

“We need a longer-term plan,” Ms. Gibbs, who oversees health and human services, said in an interview. “The city emergency evacuation plan works great for huge numbers. But it does not look much past three or four days.”

Other relief efforts felt improvised.

Realizing that poor city residents in the flood zones might have lost a refrigerator’s worth of food, the city authorized an extra allotment of food stamp money. But computerized records showed that many eligible residents did not take advantage of the bonus — most likely because they could not reach markets.

Slide 1 of 7

Volunteers deliver food and inquire about specific needs among residents of the Red Hook Houses on November 16, nearly three weeks after the storm hit.  In the first two weeks following the storm,  the city relied on ragtag bands of volunteers who quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the task of reaching and caring for trapped residents.

Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 7

    Volunteers deliver food and inquire about specific needs among residents of the Red Hook Houses on November 16, nearly three weeks after the storm hit.  In the first two weeks following the storm,  the city relied on ragtag bands of volunteers who quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the task of reaching and caring for trapped residents.

    Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Volunteer groups like People’s Relief in Coney Island and Occupy Sandy set up curbside medical clinics and rallied teams of people to go door to door searching for trapped residents. They appeared to be better organized than the city. In Red Hook, the logs created by volunteers reflected the evolving needs of tenants: batteries gave way to ice for chilling medicine and adult diapers. “DEAF: Knock Hard,” said the entry next to one man’s name.

Some volunteers felt the roles should have been reversed, with the city leading them. But Nazli Parvizi, the city’s commissioner for community affairs and the mayor’s point person in Brooklyn, said she felt effective in a supporting role. The volunteers were doing a good job, she said, and “I wasn’t here to change that narrative. I was asking them, ‘What do you need?’ ”

It was not until Nov. 9 — 11 days after Hurricane Sandy hit — that Mr. Bloomberg announced a much more robust effort to reach out to tenants of buildings still without power and heat. This time health care professionals hired by the city under an emergency contract would all be accompanied by the National Guard, and the housing authority and other landlords were informed in advance, to make sure they could get access to all the buildings. The city also asked the federal government to set up “pop-up” hospitals at certain sites.

In Coney Island, Ms. Parvizi said she was relieved that the sweeps did not turn up more trauma than they did.

“I thought all 50 of the ambulances we had would get filled at every building,” she said. “It wasn’t as drastic as that. There were only a handful in each, and there were no D.O.A.’s, though that’s not to say people weren’t suffering.”

There and in other city neighborhoods flooded by the hurricane, 400 people were found needing medical assistance, with 44 transferred to hospitals.

Delay and Uncertainty

It was as these medical teams canvassed the housing authority buildings that the repairs on the heating and electrical systems started to pick up. The city had brought in a small army of electricians and other crews under emergency contracts, who began rebuilding the damaged electrical systems and installing the temporary boilers.

These crews worked extraordinary hours — 16-hour shifts in many cases — but the effort still took much longer than Mr. Bloomberg had predicted: it was not until Nov. 18 that the final buildings had heat and hot water. City officials noted that many private apartment buildings were still without power at this date.

Mr. Rhea and other city officials said that in retrospect, the agency could have done more before the storm to identify possible contractors or replacement equipment to speed up the response. “It is better to have a plan in place, to have a turn key in place, you just hit the button and say, ‘Do it,’ ” said Caswell F. Holloway, a deputy mayor who oversees city operations.

Mr. Rhea said the authority was considering moving its flood-prone boiler rooms and electrical systems above ground — an expensive project that would require federal assistance. Last week, FEMA continued its door-to-door canvassing, where the mystery of why people had not signed up for federal aid was solved. Many residents spoke only Russian, while others were still struggling to cope with more pressing needs.

Mr. O’Neill, the tenant at the O’Dwyer Gardens complex near Surf Avenue, was among the thousands who thought the recovery would take merely days. Having contracted polio at age 13, he said his chief reason for not leaving was his extra high toilet. “Even hospital toilets are too low,” he said.

He wore extra clothes for the cold and got food and water from the volunteers. But he could not contact his doctor. And while volunteers could have gotten him medicine, he had no money for it. He cut his dosage in half for more than two weeks — until a volunteer from Baltimore gave him cash so someone could help him refill his prescription.

Asked about the City Hall view that residents should bear the consequences of their decisions to tough storms out, Mr. O’Neill winced. “Well, we’re survivors, many of us around here,” he said. “But look out the window. The ocean is right there. It’s nice 99.99 percent of the time. And then it’s not.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Housing Agency’s Flaws Revealed by Storm. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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