Sewage backup forces emergency relocations from troubled Hartford apartment complex

Twenty-nine households were evacuated from Hartford’s Barbour Gardens apartment complex Wednesday night after a plumbing failure caused wastewater to back up in their buildings, city officials said.

The incident began Tuesday with about a foot of sewer water flooding the basements of two buildings at the publicly subsidized, North End housing project, said city health director Liany Arroyo.

On Wednesday, the city had to turn off the water to those buildings to stop the sewage from backing up, forcing the emergency relocation of tenants, Arroyo said. They will spend up to a week in a hotel as the problem is resolved.

“Any time you have raw sewage exposed, it’s obviously a health risk if someone were to get in there and get exposed to that,” Arroyo said. “There’s many children here, so that’s obviously not something we would want.”

The residents include families with young children and the elderly, said Christian Activities Council executive director Cori Mackey. The Hartford nonprofit has been helping residents of Barbour Gardens wage a campaign against their property owner, ADAR Hartford Realty LLC, and other negligent landlords throughout the city.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Housing and Urban Development department announced it would cancel its rental subsidy contract with ADAR and relocate all tenants of the 84-unit, Section 8 project to clean and decent housing, but those relocations move slowly and most residents still live in the complex while conditions deteriorate further.

Management has not addressed the continued issues with mold, rodents, broken doors and windows, hot water outages, and missing fire alarm systems.

Among those being evacuated Wednesday night was a family with a newborn baby and a child with asthma, Mackey said. They live on the ground floor of the one of the buildings, where open stairwells lead directly into the basement that contains standing sewer water.

“The city I think has been working hard at getting people relocated,” Mackey said. “The issue is that once again, we can’t contact the ownership structure to figure out what’s going on. The city is stepping in and solving the situation right now because of the owner’s absence.”

She added that the situation speaks to how this country’s society treats its poor.

“It’s unconscionable that this situation was allowed to get to this point and also fully predictable,” she said.

According to Mackey, children will miss school tomorrow; families will spend money they don’t have on fast food because they’ve been put out of their kitchens; and one elderly resident is going to an emergency room instead of a hotel.

“All for conditions they did not create and do not deserve.”

The city is in contact with the current property manager and a contractor that plans to do some excavation work in the property’s parking area to locate and fix the source of the problem, said Erik Johnson, the city’s development services director.

Hartford has not been able to identify who is responsible for the limited liability company that owns Barbour Gardens.

Criminal charges are pending against one individual, New York attorney Martin Rothman, in connection with fire alarm system violations in two of the four buildings, but his own lawyer maintains that he is the wrong person to charge.

The property is owned by several individuals and other limited liability companies, some of which also have shared ownership.

Johnson said he hopes to get residents back into the building as soon as possible to minimize the impact on their planned relocations. That process in February, announced it was ending its $750,000-a-year contract with the absentee landlord.

Four months earlier, Barbour Gardens had received a failing score of 9 out of 100 from HUD.

“I wish that there weren’t 29 families in the building, that more of them had the opportunity to find other suitable housing,” he said. “We’ve been going through this process now for a couple of months, so it’s unfortunate that the process is not working fast enough.”

“We know we have an old building that needs repairs, so the longer they’re still there, the more likely stuff like this is going to happen.”

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.