Watch the video above: People without heat in TCHC building. Cindy Pom reports.
TORONTO – A Toronto woman has been forced to keep her oven on for several hours a day in order to keep warm.
The power and heat in Andrea Scott’s Toronto Community Housing apartment first went off during the pre-Christmas ice storm. It went off and on sporadically over the next few days.
“I have to use my oven and certain little things to try and keep warm,” Scott said. “This building is getting worse by the day.”
Her power is back on, but her heat has been off for eight days now and she’s been leaving the oven on for two to three hours, three times a day in order to keep warm.
“I know it’s not safe,” she said. “But it has to be done.”
Scott lives in the TCHC building at 3171 Eglinton Avenue East. The ice storm that knocked out power to 300,000 Toronto Hydro customers just a few days before Christmas knocked power out to the building and damaged the boiler.
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Workers repaired the boiler that supplies heat to the building’s radiator on Tuesday but a pipe in the building burst later the same day.
As a result, some residents in the building have heat, others don’t.
TCHC spokesperson Sara Goldvine says only five apartments in the building have broken radiators. She suggests the problems could have been fixed earlier but crews have been repeatedly delayed by further problems.
“A number of those pipes have burst in different areas of the building and as we have been fixing certain of the leaks then other leaks have sprung up,” she said. “Earlier this week we had an incident with one copper pipe that fed to one of the radiators in the lobby that broke earlier this week and that’s in the process of being fixed.”
And she says that the building, according to the index with which they rate a building’s condition, is in “fair condition.”
“I would love to give you a timeline, but this has proven to be a very unpredictable course of events. So at this point in time, we’re working on restoring everything as quick as we can.”
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But it’s not quick enough for some residents who remain without heat.
A pipe burst in the wall of Lesley Schofield’s apartment. The water broke through her wall and ruined two beds in her apartment.
“I’ve had a flood myself, burst pipes, smashed walls,” she said. “Very, very frustrated. The whole building, all the tenants would agree with me on that. Wondering who’s going to be next?”
– With files from Cindy Pom
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