Three months after a corner of their apartment building collapsed in a nearly catastrophic gas explosion, residents of a Bronx public housing complex say life is mostly back to normal — aside from an ongoing cooking gas outage and lingering traumatic memories.
An Oct. 1 boiler explosion destroyed the southwest corner of a 20-story building at the Mitchel Houses on Alexander Avenue, near 137th Street. The eruption, sparked by the building’s boiler, cast bricks and debris from an entire section of the building to the ground below.
No one was injured in the collapse, but residents were temporarily displaced to allow inspectors to determine the building's structural integrity. Cooking gas service remains out for residents in the building’s 174 apartments.
Eleventh-floor tenant Omar Castellar said he was working on Long Island and learned of the collapse from his son, who was inside their apartment at the time. He said his family members are still shaken.
“Everything is normal for me,” Castellar said. “My wife is still a little scared.”
Elsa Lozano, a retired social service worker, lives on the sixth floor and said she’s still startled by sudden loud noises. She said she was in her apartment when she heard the destruction.
“Ever since that happened, any kind of noise, I’m up,” Lozano said. “It stays with you.”
Work being done to repair the building.
Blue sheeting now covers the gash in the building left by the explosion, and fences surround the work zone below, which was quiet two days before Christmas Day.
Lozano, 74, said she’s confident the New York City Housing Authority identified the problem and will repair the boiler, the building facade and restore cooking gas.
But other tenants say they’re too worried to return.
Dee English, 60, said she and her family have been staying at her sister’s apartment in a nearby section of the Bronx since October.
“I've been shellshocked since the crumbling,” English said.
She said she and her eight relatives — including children and grandkids — cram into the two-bedroom apartment and split rent and other costs.
“We’re making the best out of it,” she said. “We’re all bunched up together, but we’re family.”
City inspectors deemed the building safe days after the partial collapse. NYCHA has not yet said publicly when it expects to restore cooking gas, though Lozano and other tenants said they were told it would take until at least the end of January. Tenants received electric hot plates to cook with. Heat and hot water were not affected by the outage.
NYCHA spokesperson Andrew Sklar said the work is “ongoing” and that the authority has restored gas service at three other Mitchel Houses buildings affected by the explosion.
“Gas service interruptions and restoration work are a matter of public safety and involve multiple partners and steps, including shutting off service, making necessary repairs, inspections, and coordinating with the service vendors, in order to safely restore service as quickly as possible,” Sklar told Gothamist.
The partial collapse placed renewed attention on the financial and physical challenges facing NYCHA following decades of mismanagement and federal disinvestment. NYCHA operates nearly 178,000 affordable apartments for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, but the sprawling public housing system, the nation’s largest, has around $78 billion in repair needs, according to its most recent estimate.
In the wake of the incident, U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres urged NYCHA to electrify the Mitchel Houses to prevent future problems.
“The explosion at Mitchel Houses should be a wake-up call,” Torres said in a statement. “It’s unacceptable that NYCHA residents are still living with outdated, flammable heating systems that put lives at risk.”
Other NYCHA sites likely have similar needs. City Limits found that most of the city’s public housing sites have far greater repair needs than the Mitchel Houses, and news site The City identified dozens of NYCHA boilers with expired permits.
