Without heat for over 3 weeks, tenants given hotel rooms until furnace fixed

Watch the video above: Tenants still without heat are being put up in hotels. Mark Carcasole reports. 

TORONTO – Tenants at a Yonge Street apartment, who’ve been without heat for almost a month, are being offered a little reprieve; a stay in a hotel room until the problems – a broken furnace and missing carbon monoxide detectors – are fixed.

But the hotel, near Mount Pleasant Road and Eglinton Avenue, is demanding certified cheques from the landlord because they’ve received late payment before. Another time she provided hotel accommodation for residents because of similar problems, she paid late, the hotel said.

The current problem dates back to mid-February when the furnace in the building at 2779 Yonge Street broke causing a carbon monoxide leak. As a result, the gas company refused to turn the heat back on until the leak is fixed.

But the landlord, Bianca Pollak, said she doesn’t have the approximately $100,000 needed to fix the furnace.

On Feb. 26, Pollak was ordered to fix the furnace and install carbon monoxide detectors , or face fines.

But as of Thursday, again meeting with the adjudicator, the furnace has not been fixed. Pollak did present several reports from contractors who said it would be a difficult job.

“I couldn’t,” Pollak told Global News leaving the meeting in north Toronto Thursday. The adjudicator gave her another week to fix the problems.

Watch the videos below: Mark Carcasole has been covering the story since February.

But for Isabel Gana, a tenant in the building, the difficulty of the fix is no excuse.

“In hindsight, I think if she did this a month ago, even a year ago, it wouldn’t have been so dangerous,” she said. “She could have done it, as I said, a year ago, when we had the initial outage back in 2013.”

Pollak has installed carbon monoxide detectors.

But another tenant – who did not want her name used – told Global News the lack of heat is making even the most mundane acts take hours.

“Trying to stay clean and live your daily life has really changed because it’s really time-consuming to try to just do things that you would normally do,” she said. “Something like taking a hot shower usually takes 10 to 15 minutes, is now taking me to the time I get home from work to about 9 or 10 at night.”

In fact, the tenant scalded herself with water she had been heating in a kettle while preparing a warm bath.

“I was boiling water to fill the bath so I could bathe myself, which took about four hours and I was lifting the kettle and it spilled all over my hand as I was lifting the kettle to pour into the bath.”

– with files from Mark Carcasole