Residents go nearly five days without water at NYCHA Millbrook Houses

At NYCHA’s Millbrook Houses, pictured here on Feb. 12, 2024, water disruptions are common — but a recent outage due to a water main leak left some residents without water for almost five days.

Photo Emily Swanson

Last week and over the weekend, residents of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Millbrook Houses experienced an unplanned water outage that lasted a few days for some — and nearly a week for others.  

“It was a pain in the ass, but we managed to get through,” said a 62-year-old resident of building 6 at 584 East 137th Street who declined to give his name — and he said it helped to see workers around the clock installing brand-new pipes. Service was finally restored Sunday, he said.  

The resident told the Bronx Times that during the outage, the water was completely off in his building from early in the morning until 11 p.m. or midnight. Water stations and bottled water were provided, he said, but it wasn’t enough for cooking and all other needs, so he ended up eating from restaurants during the whole period.

He also said with a shrug that water outages are nothing new to residents of Millbrook Houses — the city is “always turning the water off and on.” 

A search of service interruption history at the Millbrook Houses showed that since February of 2022, 27 unplanned outages of water and hot water have occurred, along with 39 planned outages. 

A NYCHA spokesperson told the Bronx Times via email that the outage was the result of “a significant subsurface water main leak caused by aging underground infrastructure” and that approximately 100 linear feet of pipe needed repair. He also said that the outage only affected residents of the top five floors of each building. The specific number of affected residents could not be obtained in time for publication.

But the outage — which was originally only supposed to affect “a few buildings,” according to the spokesperson — ended up spreading…