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COURIER L 10 IFE, OCTOBER 22-28, 2021
‘How long will
my gas be out?’
Brooklyn councilmember presses
NYCHA on winter preparedness
Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel. John McCarten, City Council
BY BROOKLYN PAPER
As head of the City Council’s Committee
on Public Housing, Brooklyn
Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel
questioned New York City Housing
Authority reps on Tuesday ahead of
the cold winter months on their level
of preparedness for heat outages.
“I cannot count how many times
I’ve received calls from residents, requesting
hot plates and asking that
million dollar question — ‘How long
will my gas be out?’ — to which I never
have an answer,” Ampry-Samuel said
at an Oct. 12 hearing.
Ampry-Samuel will most likely be
tapped by President Joe Biden as the
US Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s next regional director,
a role in which she would have greater
oversight over New York’s public housing
network. But oversight over the
lengthy process of replacing broken
boilers and answering thousands of
complaints is more diffi cult than it
looks.
NYCHA maintenance representatives,
however, shared data that shows
outages have decreased signifi cantly
over the past three years. From 2018
to 2019, there were 1,224 heat outages
across the city’s public housing complexes,
but last heat season there were
only 584.
“We brought down the average
time to restore total outages by nearly
20 percent, from 8.8 hours to 7.3 hours,
below the 12 hour restoration target,”
said NYCHA Chief Operating Offi cer
Vito Mustaciuolo. “We want to keep
bringing these numbers down even
more.”
Since then, Mustaciuolo said, the
agency has started a planned outages
program in the offseason where they
turn off the heat in order to do more
maintenance work. They’ve also been
using automatic calls to check in with
residents to see if they’re still experiencing
an outage.
“In addition, we are investing $28
million in city operating funding to replace
approximately 400 heating equipment
components, such as hot water
boiler replacements, heat control panels
and tanks,” the CEO said.
To date, NYCHA has replaced 64
boilers across its complexes, and the
agency says it’s on track to replace 297
by 2026.
Still, it remains unclear what will
happen in the meantime for residents
experiencing outages, aside from rapid
repairs. When heating outages happen,
it’s likely that families will have
to rely on small space heaters, or try
to fi nd somewhere else to stay — and
extra food and water, blankets and
more may not be resources that every
family can stock up on to prepare for a
very cold winter.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which
predicts long range weather forecasts
based on solar science, predicts
a rough winter ahead for New York.
Calling it a “season a shivers,” the editor
of the Almanac said it could be one
of the longest and coldest winters the
city has seen in years.
“There is a lot of work that needs to
be done,” Ampry-Samuel said Tuesday,
vowing to make the process of pressing
NYCHA and gaining feedback about issues
such as heating and other repair
work an ongoing one. “These are defi -
nitely issues that we need to look into
and have the Department of Youth &
Community Development address.”
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