Sporadic outages of hot water at a Centretown social housing residence in recent weeks highlight a long-term maintenance problem facing the 15,000 homes managed across the city by Ottawa Community Housing Corp., the head of the agency has acknowledged.
Residents of a 249-unit building at 415 MacLaren St. are now safe from erratic streams of cold water during showers, says OCHC’s chief executive Jo-Anne Poirier.
The building was without reliable hot water for three brief stretches of time in November, December and early January, says Poirier, blaming an old, failing boiler for the problem. Some residents dispute that, saying the trouble lasted longer and was a significant inconvenience.
Ann Swackhamer says cold water poured onto her body whenever she tried taking a shower between the end of November to around Christmas Eve.
“I suffered through it because I needed to take a shower,” she says.
Swackhamer says OCHC officials’ advice to boil water on a stove and fill the bathtub during the hot water outage was not helpful for her.
“I can’t lift anything heavy, or else my knees will buckle, and my back will be in a lot of…pain,” she says.
Swackhamer says she has severe arthritis, back and knee problems. Alternatives to showering included scrubbing her body with a sponge, she says.
“I know it’s been difficult,” Poirier concedes.
But she insists “it’s not accurate that there was no hot water for over a month… At times during peak demand, it was very difficult to get hot water.”
Swackhamer says tenants living on the upper floors did get hot water from time to time, but her floor, which is on the fifth, did not.
“It was only cold, cold, cold.”
Now, says Poirier, the old boiler has new valves to help generate hot water, “but we are not taking a chance” that the fix will last. She says she’s waiting for consultants to give a timeline to replace the water-heating system.
Despite OCHC’s financial challenges, Poirier says the agency has set aside money for the replacement plan. The OCHC will pay for a new boiler through continued low-interest mortgages from Infrastructure Ontario, and will seek for grants from other levels of government, she says. But Poirier says potential problems at the corporation’s huge stock of social housing remain a concern because of hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance costs that have accumulated over the years.
In 2008, a report showed that the OCHC had accumulated about $332 million in deferred maintenance costs for its 15,000 homes scattered across Ottawa, according to a third-party building assessment. The study, carried out by the international engineering and construction company Conestoga-Rovers & Associates, concluded that more government was required to overcome years of deferred maintenance on OCHC buildings.
The OCHC was formed in 2002 following a merger of two previous social housing providers in Ottawa.
The report recommended that the backlog of maintenance work meant the OCHC needed to invest about $60 million per year to catch up with building upgrades, such as installing energy-efficient toilets, Poirier says.
However, the OCHC could not gather that much money, she says. This year, the OCHC will be spending about $30 million to maintain and update the housings, she says.
“But at some point in time,” Poirier acknowledges, “we need a long-term strategy and additional funding to fix the problem once and for all.”