Nearly 5K East Harlem NYCHA Residents Lose Hot Water

EAST HARLEM, NY — Thousands of East Harlem public housing residents were left without hot water for hours on Monday after an early-morning outage hit an entire 22-building complex.

The hot water outage at the Robert F. Wagner Houses — which spans a number of city blocks east of Second Avenue between East 120th and 125th streets — was first reported around 6 a.m. Monday morning, according to the New York City Housing Authority's outage dashboard. The outage affected all 4,714 residents in the development's 2,162 units, according to the public records.

The unplanned outage was eventually fixed after about 9 hours, according to the NYCHA dashboard. A request for more information about the outage, its cause and the agency's efforts to fix it was not immediately returned.

As temperatures continue to dip in New York City, landlords such as the New York City Housing Authority are expected to provide consistent heat and hot water for tenants. The official heating season began on Oct. 1 and will continue through May. The housing authority has struggled with widespread heating failures in recent years, one of the many problems that a federal monitor has been tasked with tracking.

The Legal Aid Society is currently suing the city to win public housing tenants rent relief for NYCHA's failure to provide heat during the winters of 2017 and 2018. The lawsuit accuses the housing authority of failing to maintain its boilers and wrongly closing out heat complaints without ensuring utilities were restored.