Flooding affected apartments on the first three floors of the St. Mary's NYCHA complex in Mott Haven this week and knocked out the elevators. Residents said hot water and steam came through the pipes. They said NYCHA workers traced the flooding to a vacant fourth-floor apartment where someone had allegedly broken in and stolen a pipe.
Joellys Gaton told News 12 that she woke after hearing a noise and found standing water in her apartment. Fashawn Holly said her sister called in distress to report extensive flooding in her own unit. Residents also said NYCHA workers brought wet vacuums to address the water.
Tenants Say Workers Pointed to a Stolen Pipe
Holly said workers told her someone had broken into the vacant unit upstairs and stolen a pipe, which tenants believe caused the flooding below. The alleged theft had not been confirmed by the NYPD as of Monday night, according to News 12. A NYCHA spokesperson told the outlet that officers had responded to the complex but referred further questions to police.
The damage described by residents went beyond wet floors. Holly said the floodwater ruined furniture, couches and televisions in her sister's apartment, on top of the standing water and steam that greeted other tenants when they woke up. With the building's elevators also knocked out by the flooding, residents were left dealing with both property damage and a mobility headache in a multi-story complex.
Frustration Over NYCHA's Response
Rather than treating the flooding as the emergency tenants felt it was, residents say NYCHA told them to submit a routine repair ticket. Holly pushed back hard on that approach, insisting a major flood is an emergency that must be handled immediately, not filed away like any other maintenance request. NYCHA's own published guidance, outlined on its leak-repair FAQ, states that reports of flooding or leaks from above require a 24-hour response from staff and cannot be rescheduled or canceled until the condition is verified and abated. Tenants can also file maintenance reports around the clock through NYCHA's Customer Contact Center, as detailed on the NYC311 portal.
How Tenants Can Escalate Unresolved Leaks
NYCHA’s published guidance, described above, calls for a 24-hour response to reports of flooding or leaks from above. If a leak or moisture repair remains unresolved after contacting NYCHA, residents can seek further help from the court-appointed Ombudsperson Call Center (OCC), which says NYCHA should have an opportunity to respond first. A historical measure of repair backlogs comes from the city comptroller’s audit of NYCHA maintenance and repairs from January 1, 2013, through July 31, 2014. The Office of the New York City Comptroller reported that more than 80 percent of emergency repair work orders in the reviewed category went unaddressed for more than 24 hours. That is a historical finding, not evidence about NYCHA’s response to the St. Mary's flooding.
Not the First Bronx NYCHA Building to Flood This Year
St. Mary's is hardly an isolated case. Back in January, a broken water line at a Castle Hill NYCHA building on Havemeyer Avenue flooded several floors and damaged tenants' belongings, with one resident calling the scene simply terrible, the station's report noted. NYCHA said at the time that plumbers were on site responding to the break while maintenance staff worked to remove water from the affected units.
Older incidents point to a pattern of plumbing failures cascading through Bronx public housing towers. In 2018, a Morrisania Air Rights building saw plumbing fail on its 20th and 17th floors on consecutive days, according to the New York Daily News, sending water cascading through elevator shafts and staircases and forcing elderly and sick residents to trudge down 20 flights of stairs. Residents there said the water got so deep that floor tiles began floating. A second pipe burst in that same building within 24 hours of the first, according to NY1, forcing crews to temporarily shut down the elevators again while they made repairs.
Plumbing complaints have also surfaced elsewhere in the city's public housing stock. A 2024 report from CBS New York described recurring flooding and plumbing problems facing NYCHA residents in Williamsburg, with one tenant describing the frustration of watching the same thing happen again and again with no way to fix the source. For now, the question of who allegedly stole the pipe at St. Mary's, and how, remains with investigators, while tenants on the complex's lower floors are left cleaning up the damage.
