Parts of Lower Manhattan may spend the holidays and beyond hooked up to noisy, noxious generators if building management companies don’t soon finish necessary repairs.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, many downtown Manhattan buildings relied on emergency generators for power in an effort to return to normalcy. As of last week, Council Member Margaret Chin’s office reported 105 emergency generators were still operating downtown, providing electricity to these buildings.

While these generators may be necessary in an emergency, community members and elected officials are concerned over why they still have such a prominent presence downtown. The generators emit potent, potentially hazardous fumes and often deafening noises. They also appear to be running largely unregulated by city agencies, which have not demonstrated much oversight in the situation, according to downtown’s elected officials.

“Many of the streets in Lower Manhattan, particularly in the Financial District, are literally lined with [these] generators,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. “We all know that after 9/11, thousands of Lower Manhattan residents were exposed to air that caused serious health problems, and we cannot allow that to happen again.”

A Con Edison spokesperson explained that the buildings’ management companies are responsible for the generators still in place.

“They’re the ones who bore the brunt,” he said.

Chin’s office agreed that Con Edison is not to blame for the delay. The buildings’ management companies reportedly continue to push back the dates when they’ll be ready to reconnect to power, now giving time frames as late as April in some cases.

“Con Edison is willing and ready to hook these buildings back up,” said Kelly Magee, a spokesperson for the council member. “The buildings are not ready to receive power. The buildings have some kind of issue, whether it’s damage to the transformer or a part that needs a replacement—they’re unable to hook back up to the grid.”

Magee said these buildings’ management companies would not return their phone calls and there was no explanation as to why the dates kept getting pushed back. She speculated building management companies are taking advantage of this opportunity to make other repairs to their buildings. Without incentive for the management companies and enforcement by the city, she said there’s not enough pressure for the companies to act in a timely fashion.

Once a building is ready to be hooked back up to the Con Edison grid, only a quick inspection is necessary before this can take place.

Council Member Chin, whose Lower Manhattan district has many such generators, is disappointed in the city’s response thus far. She said her office has received many residential complaints over the last month and that she’s repeatedly reached out to the city and tried to work through official channels.

One woman called the council member’s office to complain she had fainted while exiting a downtown subway because of the overwhelming fumes released by the generators.

“The residents are contacting our office and saying they need help—these fumes are going right into their apartments,” explained Chin. “People have been very patient and they understand it’s an emergency, but week after week … it’s taking too long.”

“The Department of Health needs to provide solutions,” said Chin. “Now they’re saying seal off your windows with plastic—that’s not an appropriate way to live.”

“The phone calls are seriously disturbing,” added Magee.

Magee said the council member’s office has been working to get the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene to come out and regularly conduct inspections of the generators.

“What it seems like to us is in the beginning there was an emergency situation; a lot was done without much oversight, and it wasn’t until we asked for enforcement that the DEP started doing anything,” Magee said.

“We go and look around ourselves, and we can see the smoke spewing out,” she added. “The DEP needs to be down there every single day, and they need to get the dirty ones out.”

The council member said it seemed not much thought had been given to the generators’ physical placement either.

“To be listening to one 24 hours a day is a lot to ask of residents,” said Chin, who explained they were loud enough to drown out any conversation in the street.

Ryan Carlino works on Water Street, right by the river. He said he was not allowed to return to his office building until Dec. 4.

“We literally have to walk through a tunnel of generators to get to the entrance of our building,” he said. “There’s smoke everywhere. It constantly smells like diesel fumes.”

“I’m sure they’re safe, I guess,” he added. “They were OK’d by the EPA. But they look like they could blow up or electrocute someone at any point.”

The generators are also loud, according to Carlino. “The noise isn’t a huge inconvenience since you can’t hear them inside,” he said. “It’s just really weird and post-apocalyptic walking through them to get to work.”

When asked how he knew the generator had been approved by the EPA, Carlino said his company’s operations coordinators told workers the EPA had checked them out.

A Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson confirmed that DEP inspectors are going block by block in Lower Manhattan to ensure that all generators are properly certified and are meeting emissions standards, and the DEP has also teamed up with the city’s Health Department and the state Department of Environmental Conservation to monitor air quality. The agencies have installed three additional air testing sites since Hurricane Sandy and have not detected patterns of higher concentrations of particulate matter.

While they may technically be safe, the generators are still a huge nuisance. In many cases, residents cannot understand why the generators powering some commercial buildings must remain running all night.

“Imagine that happening continuously all day long and at night when people are supposed to be sleeping,” said Chin. “We have families and lots of young kids down here.”

Chin said the city has already established a rapid repair program with residential buildings, one which might soon have to extend to commercial buildings as well.

“It’s unacceptable that they will be there all winter,” she said. “If there are missing parts, get them.”
While the noise and pollutants affect residents and workers in the area, Chin is particularly concerned about generators operating directly outside of a downtown school complex.

“We need all the help we can get,” said Chin. “We want this done by Christmas. This is our Christmas present.”

Carlino is at least glad to be back in his own office building despite the generators. “We were up in Times Square,” he said. “It was awful.”

Flood and her mother Anette had just parked her car in front of the house five minutes ago. Now, it was teetering on the edge of a 20-foot-deep by 20-foot-wide sinkhole that had opened up while she was inside.

Photo of the Bay Ridge Sinkhole by Twitter user @gazawia

“We’re so blessed,” she told CBS News. “If we were five minutes later or anything, we could have been in the hole.”

FDNY and members of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) arrived at the scene — 79th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues — and were able to rescue the car. No injuries were reported, though some family’s cars were stuck in their driveways.

According to the DEP, the hole was caused by the collapse of a 50-inch, century-old sewer pipe.  It remains unclear, however, exactly why the hole opened up.

DEP spokesperson Jim Roberts says repairs will last at least through the weekend. “It’s a reasonably deep excavation, so we have to be cautious about how we go about it so it’s safely done,”  he told CBS.

Some residents are skeptical about the quality of work that is going into the city’s street construction in the first place. Christine Hansen said to CBS, “The work is shabby. They’re not doing the work right. It’s not being filled in properly.”

Whether or not Hansen is correct, this certainly isn’t the first sinkhole the city has seen. In fact, one appeared last month just 15 blocks away.

One struck 106th Street in Manhattan a year ago when a water main broke and flooded several subway stations.

A reoccurring one also stopped traffic in Midtown last year.

One hit Bedford Park in 2010.

One even swallowed an SUV in Brooklyn back in 2006.

The list goes on, sadly. Know of more? Share your New York City sinkhole story below!

Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal heeded the itchy cries of residents on and around West 84th Street who have been suffering from a bafflingly hard to quash infestation, rounding up city officials to hear their tales and explain what the city is doing to combat the insects. The result was a promise to coordinate efforts and take the problem seriously, which barely soothed a very frustrated population.

“It’s not [just] a nuisance,” said Lisa Perlman, who brought photos of her young son’s red, swollen leg after he suffered a mosquito attack. “These mosquitoes are biting ,and their bites itch like hell for days; they hurt like black fly bites.” She and dozens of other meeting attendees said they or their kids sleep under mosquito nets in an effort to keep them away, but are sometimes up all night swatting.

Representatives from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Con Edison each explained to the public what they were doing to combat the localized pests. Mosquitoes breed in standing water, and despite residents’ best efforts to eliminate stagnant water from the area and the city flushing the sewer system over 10 times in recent months, a single sewer trap is still catching over 300 mosquitoes in a day on West 84th Street.

Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, an urban entomologist from Cornell University, explained the science of the problem and told residents that even little measures might help eliminate mosquitoes.

“If you find a bottle cap, get rid of it. If you see leaves in the gutters, get rid of them,” she said. “High participation is required.”

Gangloff-Kaufmann said that installing screens is the “No. 1 [method of] urban pest control,” but acknowledged that they won’t solve the root of the problem.

Part of the difficulty in eradicating the pesky bugs is that it requires the coordination of several city agencies. For example, the DEP can flush the sewers, but it can’t pull up any part of the roads without the go-ahead from the DOT. The DOHMH is responsible for pest control, but they still have to work with other agencies.

While some at the meeting wanted to know why the city won’t just spray chemicals to kill all the larvae, others were quick to reject that idea, saying they’d rather not resort to poison in a residential area.

Part of the frustration people felt was due to the fact that because the species of mosquito found on the Upper West Side hasn’t been shown to carry West Nile virus, the city has treated the infestation as a nuisance rather than an imminent threat to public health.

“The premise is, if someone doesn’t die, you can go to hell,” said West 84th Street resident Abraham Newman. “This is just a small sampling of the people who are suffering day and night. They have no recourse, no one listens to them, no one gives a damn because no one has died.”

City officials also admitted that they don’t know exactly what the next steps should be. Rosenthal suggested they all come to the location of the infestation and work as a task force to come up with more creative solutions, which all of the agencies agreed to.

“I’m happy that this many people came here, and that the agency representatives got to hear from them directly,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think they grasped the magnitude of the problem.”

She also suggested that if the city can’t come up with a fix, they should bring in an outside consultant.

“It doesn’t seem that the city has responded in a way that is really going to solve the problem,” Rosenthal said. “They admitted, ‘I don’t know what the problem is, it’s a mystery.’ I mean, that’s not acceptable. These are intelligent, involved people and they’re not going to be happy until the problem is fixed.”