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Toilet paper and dried sewage dot the floor of 540 W. 159th Street. PHOTO: Daniel P. Bader
There’s something very wrong going on under the street at 540 W. 159th Street, and it stinks. When a river of water rushes down the hill from open hydrants and into the sewer drain in front of this pre-war building, it doesn’t rush off out of sight. It gushes out of a wall in the basement of the building. If that weren’t bad enough, the sewer also backs up, flooding the basement an inch deep with raw sewage.
On a recent visit, the basement is dry when building manager Tobias Slater and superintendent Victor Lugo open the doors. Outside, only one of the two hydrants uphill from the building is open – it’s being used by the playstreet that shuts down the block all summer. On hot, humid days a sprinkler cap showers children from the block with cool water.
Some days, though, Slater says the hydrant, just one building away, is opened – without a sprinkler cap – and water quickly begins to pump out of his wall.
“The water backs up and goes back into the building,” he says, pointing at the wall. “You can see it coming through the crack.”
Indeed, the paint is missing from a manhole-sized part of the wall bordering the street. Cracks run through the concrete. Behind him the basement smells musty. Lugo covers his nose with his shirt and gives a quick tour, careful not to step on the dried toilet paper stuck to the floor or the remains of who-knows-what near it.
On July 29 firefighters told Slater that the seal between the hydrant and the water pipe was defective and when it was on full blast, water would run down the pipe, wearing away soil underneath the sidewalk and the building.
Firefighters fixed the hydrant, but the water still gushes.
“We’re sending a crew up there to find out what’s going on,” said Mercedes Padilla, a spokesperson for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the city’s 109,000 hydrants.
She said that when hydrants are opened illegally, and water blasts out at over 1,000 gallons per minute, hilly neighborhoods like Washington Heights often have problems with pooling water.
Padilla said she couldn’t immediately speak about 540 Ft. Washington Ave., or about the sewers, but said the DEP has an ongoing education program to let people know about the dangers of open hydrants.
Typical safety campaigns center around how children and adults can be injured by the force of the water and how open hydrants create a drop in water pressure, which can be dangerous when fighting a fire.
However, generally little is said about how the flood of water cascading through the street can cause property damage.
"It makes us very nervous,” said Yvonne Stennett, executive director of Community League of the Heights, the non-profit that owns 540 Ft. Washington Ave. “It’s literally undermining the foundation of the building.”
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