Twelve days after the Sandy surge whacked the city, half of the New Yorkers still without heat, hot water or power were in public housing.
Hundreds of NYCHA buildings across Brooklyn and in Far Rockaway, Queens, were affected. Some 35,000 residents were trapped in a time gone by, boiling water for baths, shutting themselves in when the sun went down, going to the bathroom in buckets.
And the NYCHA, they say, was barely visible.
“We have seen nobody,” said a furious Diedre Jackson of Surfside Houses in Coney Island, whose apartment was still frigid and dark Friday.
Dozens of shell-shocked tenants at several hard-hit developments told the Daily News last week that the few NYCHA workers they saw during 12 days of hell offered neither information nor help.
They scoffed at Chairman John Rhea’s claim that NYCHA workers hit the ground right after Hurricane Sandy, updating residents on what he said was an aggressive effort to restore power, water and heat.
“They kept giving me different dates” for when power would resume, said Grandon Gibbs, a resident of the Red Hook Houses.
Residents, public officials and even NYCHA workers blasted the authority for moving at a snail’s pace to relieve the suffering.
“You have to look at this from the perspective of the people who live in these buildings and how this affects them,” said Brooklyn City Councilman Stephen Levin, who wrestled with NYCHA to restore power to the Gowanus Houses. “For NYCHA as a bureaucracy, that’s just not how they look at things.”
In the Red Hook Houses, a worker on Friday used a garden hose attached to a pump to try to clear water from a basement. Predictably, water kept refilling the room, a worker told The News. Power can’t be restored until the basement is dry.
A temporary boiler that would provide heat and hot water arrived at Red Hook Thursday but sat idle on Friday.
City Councilman Brad Lander, who spent all last week pressing NYCHA to speed things up, said four more boilers “on order” had yet to show up. NYCHA declined to say when the boilers were ordered, and Rhea has said it will take several days to “power up” the machines.
Gibbs, 50, who lives in a Red Hook building that was hit by the surge, said water stayed in the basement for days with no effort to pump it out.
“They let the water sit there all week long and the salt ate up the wires,” he speculated.
Coney Island was hit particularly hard. A 7-foot surge filled basements nearly two blocks inland. Saltwater flooded electrical rooms, blowing out switches and depositing tons of beach sand everywhere.
By Friday, tenants in the Coney Island Houses, Surfside Gardens, O’Dwyer Gardens and Carey Gardens lived in a postapocalyptic landscape of boarded-up businesses and nonfunctioning traffic and street lights.
Late last week, an elderly woman sifted through trash, picking out cans of food at the Coney Island Houses.
“We get no information,” said Tatiana Lyssenko, 67, who trudged daily up 11 flights with bottles of water to pour into her toilet so it would work. On Tuesday water finally came back, but it was cold.
“I am always agitated with this situation. And I have high blood pressure. But for me, it’s a big luxury to worry about that.”
“It has no logic,” she said, shaking her head.
In the Far Rockaways, the Hammel Houses took a beating like the rest of the neighborhhood. There Tonia Etheridge, 35, who works at a nearby chocolate factory, tried to see keep her suffering in perspective.
Her four children ages six to 16 are bundled up in long johns and layers to stay warm, walking around the apartment in fleece blankets.
“I can’t complain because at the end of the day, we’re blessed to have a roof over our heads,” she said. “A lot of people lost their homes.
“It’d be selfish to complain over our heat right now,” she said.
But home health aide Teraishia Christian, 21, was beginning to lose patience.
She and her two-year-old son are sick from the lack of heat and she doesn’t know where to find a doctor now in the post-Sandy Rockaways.
“My son woke up in the middle of the night saying he was cold, so I had to get blankets and wrap him up in it,” she said. “No human being should live like this. “
On Friday Mayor Bloomberg promised electric service would be returned to all the developments by the end of the weekend.
A few hours later, NYCHA spokeswoman Stainback offered this caveat: “Assuming all goes according to plan, that’s the best case scenario.”
With Clare Trapasso
gsmith@nydailynews.com
