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A week after Sandy, public housing project residents grow desperate

Volunteer Evelyn Ford helps distribute clothes, food and blankets at an aid station for victims of Superstorm Sandy in Lindenhurst, New York on Monday, November 5, 2012.

By Shashank Bengali, Tribune Washington Bureau –

NEW YORK — When Ulysses Bermudez hikes upstairs to check on his elderly neighbors in his public housing project in Brooklyn, he is met by a fetid stench from people unable or afraid to go down the 14 dark flights to use portable toilets set up in the street.

“People can’t live like this,” he said Monday.

But a week after super storm Sandy slammed into New York, many still do. Hundreds of residents in the Red Hook West project, Brooklyn’s largest, are without heat, electricity, elevators or water. Garbage piles up in pitch-black hallways, food rots in freezers without power, and the darkened stairwells stink of urine.

“When they finally get everything up and running, they’re going to have to get fire hoses in to clean this place out and make it livable again,” said Bermudez, 57, who lives in the 1950s-era housing complex, three red-brick high rises in a gritty neighborhood less than a mile from Lower Manhattan.

Those who can leave have gone. But many, including the elderly, say they have nowhere to go. So they or their friends lug water up the stairs, and use bleach and plungers to flush their toilets. Most haven’t showered in a week.

“This is a disgusting way to live,” said Barbara Robinson, 73, before she trudged up 13 flights of stairs.

Sandy seemed to have hit New York’s public housing — built decades ago to replace slums and help the needy — especially hard. Some 365 buildings lost power after the storm, and half saw flooding in their boiler or electrical rooms. While many of the buildings hit by the storm have had power and heat restored, 35,000 people still need heat and hot water and 21,000 people live in buildings where electricity is still out.

So as nighttime temperatures drop to the 20s, and as forecasters warn a nor’easter is brewing in the Atlantic, residents sleep in hoodies, jackets and socks, and huddle under blankets handed out by charities. Some leave their ovens on at night to generate a little heat — risking fire or, if the pilot light goes out, a potentially lethal release of gas.

The contrast couldn’t be starker between the darkness on the edge of Brooklyn and the bright lights of Manhattan, where electricity has mostly returned.

“All I hear on the news is that the lights are back on in Manhattan,” said Carolyn Lee, 56. “You don’t hear anything about Red Hook.”

The deprivation has fed a growing despair among residents who say federal and state officials have forgotten the low-lying neighborhood in western Brooklyn, where Sandy’s huge tidal surge swallowed cars and flooded blocks more than half a mile inland. Several businesses were wiped out, and the Red Hook post office and the main elementary school have closed indefinitely.

National Guard troops and volunteers have fanned out to distribute food, water, batteries and other essentials. Utility company crews have restored power to some buildings, but most of Red Hook West, which normally is home to more than 3,300 people, remains in the dark.

In one of the high-rises, flood water washed into the basement and appears to have knocked out the incinerator, causing some people to leave bags of garbage in the hallways and staircases.

The city set up portable toilets outside the building, but some residents still try to use their own toilets instead of walking up and down in the bitter cold and dark. For some, however, the mere arrival of the emergency facilities last week was a sign that the city didn’t expect conditions to improve anytime soon.

“That was extremely depressing,” said Albert Barnes, 66. “It made me think the road to recovery would be slower than we could imagine.”

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