Coney Island public housing still struggling with repairs, broken cooking gas 10 years after Sandy

This fall marks 10 years since Hurricane Sandy, and public housing residents in the seaside community of Coney Island are still struggling with its legacy on a daily basis.

Delayed repairs and temporary fixes — some dating back to the initial aftermath — have continuously interrupted essential services like heat and, in some buildings, running water.

Now, a decade-long remediation project is directly responsible for a cooking gas line break at O’Dwyer Gardens, one of the Coney Island's largest public housing complexes.

Hundreds of families in O’Dwyer have been calling for the city to restore cooking gas since construction broke ground on NYCHA’s Resilience and Recovery project in February, according to residents and local leaders. That project aims to replace damaged boilers and generators destroyed by the 2012 hurricane — but has instead broken gas lines. A spokesperson for the NYCHA acknowledged via email that the break at O'Dwyer happened because of the restoration project.

Similar failures across the road at another public housing development – labeled Coney Island I, but known locally as Sites 4 & 5 — are believed by residents to be due to crumbling infrastructure, exacerbated by damage after the storm.

There, another 1,000 residents have been without cooking gas for nearly a year, said building Tenant Association President Felita Jackson. In an emailed statement, NYCHA said that all of the 376 apartments are currently affected in one building at the complex. According to NYCHA’s online development portal, open monthly work orders at Sites 4 & 5 have grown 54% over the last year, from approximately 1,350 unresolved orders in June 2021 to 2,080 in June 2022.

“After Sandy I’ve had a lot of problems,” said Irma Bagan, a retired, disabled resident of O’Dwyer. “What’s going on in here is really crazy, because you pay rent you know you want to live decent. Not like an animal. They treat us like we’re not human beings, they treat us like dogs.”

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