Stringer Audit Finds NYCHA ‘Woefully Unprepared’ For Another Sandy

Comptroller Scott Stringer on Tuesday charged NYCHA with being “woefully unprepared” for another emergency and said the agency had failed to learn lessons from Superstorm Sandy.

And audit by the comptroller’s office discovered alarming deficiencies in NYCHA’s plans to assist tenants with disabilities, disaster trainings and drills, emergency staffing policies, reporting systems, and generator inventory management.

“More than three years after Superstorm Sandy struck New York City – damaging 402 NYCHA buildings and shutting off essential services including heat, hot water, electricity, and elevators for tens of thousands of residents – we found that NYCHA is still woefully unprepared to face another emergency,” Stringer said in a press release.

When Sandy struck, tenants at more than 400 NYCHA properties, some in southern Brooklyn, were stranded for weeks without heat and other basic amenities. Elected officials later took the agency to task for installing expensive replacement boilers after the storm that broke down and were not able to withstand the New York winter. NYCHA was also accused of dragging its feet in making basic repairs to remove mold and fix leaks left behind by the storm.

On the day Stringer released his audit, a federal judge concluded NYCHA had failed comply with a court order to promptly remove mold in NYCHA buildings and ordered a special master be appointed to oversee the agency’s mold removal efforts, the New York Times reports.

Despite the avalanche of bad news about NYCHA’s progress recovering from Superstorm Sandy, the agency was defiant in its reaction to the comptroller’s audit.

A NYCHA spokesperson told the Daily News that Stringer’s audit is “yet another example of the Comptroller cherry picking data and shifting timelines to paint an outdated picture of NYCHA.”

The comptroller’s audit randomly picked out 483 tenant files listed as disabled and concluded that 80 percent of the emergency contact information in those files was inaccurate. Ten of the files contained no contact information.

The audit further discovered that NYCHA has failed to keep tabs on tenants who are blind, deaf, or have other disabilities. NYCHA has also lost track of many of many of its generators. At 13 public housing properties, auditors discovered that 95 percent of inventory tags for generators did not match the list at the main office.

NYCHA has also failed to properly inform tenants about emergency procedures. And a survey of 13 NYCHA properties revealed that building managers had no idea who was in charge during an emergency.

The report also noted that since 2005 NYCHA has failed to join the city’s Incident Command System (ICS), designed to ensure a chain of command during an emergency. Two NYCHA borough directors told auditors that they didn’t think feel like doing the paperwork to join ICS because emergencies are “considered part of day-to-day business.”

Stringer implored NYCHA to clean up its act and promptly address the issues identified in the report.