Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy flooded the Red Hook Houses, the Housing Authority finally got around to knocking on tenants’ doors and found 127 residents who needed medical care.
Most were treated on site last Tuesday by nurses, but in six cases, the Brooklyn residents’ needs were so critical that they had to be transported by ambulance to hospitals.
NYCHA’s daily update about storm progress did not reveal the emergency runs, but when confronted by the Daily News, the agency confirmed that some of these tenants had “dangerously high blood pressure” or displayed diabetes symptoms that required immediate treatment.
Another tenant appeared to be suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, while an elderly man was living with a fractured hip left untreated from before the storm.
Several elderly tenants were unable to care for themselves and required home care attendants, and in 44 cases, the tenants’ medications had run out, according to NYCHA. A nurse practitioner updated the prescriptions and filled them that day.
A big concern was the onset of hypothermia in apartments that had been without power, heat, hot water and elevators since Oct. 29 — including several nights during and after the Nov. 7 nor’easter when the temperature dropped to freezing.
“What they found there was incredible,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.
De Blasio fears this frightening scenario exists in other hard-hit areas and is demanding that NYCHA and Mayor Bloomberg expand the door-to-door campaign to both public and private buildings that went without power, heat, hot water and elevators for weeks.
“The natural thing for the city to do is go building-by-building to make sure people really are back to square one and not declaring victory and leaving people behind,” he said. “You have people who are shut into their apartments. They need to be checked on. Why on earth wouldn’t we go that extra mile given the extent of this crisis?”
NYCHA and the mayor’s office insist that they have conducted door-to-door canvassing of public and private housing without basic services in Coney Island and the Rockaways, as well as Red Hook, since the storm hit.
Late Sunday, the mayor announced he’d greatly expanded the door-to-door campaign so that medical teams with paramedics and the National Guard had hit 65,000 apartments, reaching 42,000 people in NYCHA properties, rental buildings and single-family homes.
“The well-being of the residents in impacted communities is and will remain our top priority,” Bloomberg said.
De Blasio said the 42,000 New Yorkers checked on so far are a fraction of the overall population affected by the storm. His office estimates several hundred thousand people lost basic services for weeks.
“They’re missing whole parts of the city. It’s scattershot,” said de Blasio. “We hear it over and over: ‘No one has knocked on our door.'”
In Brighton Beach, Irine Lombardo, 74, has yet to hear from the city after fleeing her flooded NYCHA apartment in Coney Island to stay with a friend in nearby Brighton Beach.
Her oxygen tanks apparently floated away with Hurricane Sandy, and she’s now beginning to feel the effects of living without them for three weeks.
Her living conditions are anything but ideal: She’s staying with a friend, Olga Romanov, in a fifth-floor apartment without heat, hot water or elevators. The building just got power back Thursday, and it takes Lombardo an hour to struggle down the stairs to the street.
“Of course, she is totally disoriented, she is depressed, and she is without oxygen,” Romanov said through a translator. “She’s basically trapped.”
“Nobody came to us from the city. Nobody came to us from NYCHA,” Romanov said.
On Friday de Blasio’s office contacted the city Department of Health to try to get oxygen tanks for Lombardo. The Health Department referred them to the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp., where officials told Lombardo to go to Coney Island Hospital — where she might be able to get a prescription for the oxygen, which she would then have to go to a pharmacy to fill.
Late Sunday, volunteers with Physicians for a National Health Program managed to get oxygen tanks to Lombardo.
Email: gsmith@nydailynews.com
