Patients Shiver, Setting Off Alarms

Patients and staff at a nursing home in the Hill got the shivers, as city inspectors rushed to order repairs to a heating system.

New Haven government’s housing code enforcement agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), is demanding that the home, Advanced Nursing and Rehabilitation Center on Davenport Avenue, get its heating system up to snuff in the next 24 hours or it might face sanctions.

Problems with the half-functioning heating system were discovered after residents and staff contacted local officials Wednesday about a lack of heating in a wing of the former Jewish Home for the Aged complex.

After an emergency inspection of the complex Wednesday night, Rafael Ramos, LCI’s deputy director of housing code enforcement, said that the heating system was functioning at only half its capacity because a pump was no longer working.

“I have concerns that the system is on half a heart,” Ramos told Advanced Administrator Peter Showstead (pictured at left in photo) at close to midnight Wednesday. ​“What I mean by that is that there’s a pump down there. That system is designed for two pumps — you only have one pump. The other pump is tossed up, and we need that pump to be re-installed. Should this one pump go out you’re not going to have anything. That’s a concern for us.”

Ramos’s inspection turned up a dripping sprinkler stack pipe in the basement that he said could be an indication that the complex’s heating system was losing pressure. He also found some exposed wires that needed to be addressed.

“I have to stay here tonight until I get 65 or more in each room,” he said. ​“I went to two wings, on two floors and the average temperature is 57.”

Ramos told Showstead that if the system didn’t get the rooms heated to at least 65, Showstead would need to implement a Plan B, possibly moving resident patients to vacant rooms in warmer parts of the building or opening up the wing so that warmth from other parts of the building could flow into the colder parts of the complex.

A Long Cold Night

Patient Ivan Foskey was wearing a few layers of clothes under his sweatsuit. He had a thick comforter on his bed and was still cold. His roommate Leroy Brown didn’t have as much reinforcement. He braved the cold in their third-floor room a with a light hospital blanket. He is recovering from injuries related to a gunshot. He said that when he asked for an extra blanket, he was told that there weren’t anymore available.

The room was chilly enough that all the visitors who showed up over several hours Wednesday night remained in their winter overcoats, hats and gloves.

Depending on whom you asked, it had been cold in the third floor wing of the former Jewish Home for the Aged for days, a day, or several hours. But either way something was amiss when Rafael Ramos’s phone started to ring at about 7:30 p.m.

The call came in from Newhallville Alder Brenda Foskey-Cyrus. She wanted Ramos to get the bottom of why on such a cold night, nursing and rehabilitation patients liker her son, Ivan, who is recovering from a stroke, were bundled up without any heat.

“They’re sitting there in their warm houses, and they’ve got people living in here like animals,” she said of management.

All Hands On Deck

Ramos quickly sent LCI Inspector Frank Alvarado Jr. to check out at the complex, which houses about 160 nursing and rehabilitation patients. But Ramos’ phone wasn’t the only one that started ringing in the city.

Fellow Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn got a call. So did State Rep. Robyn Porter and former Hill Alder (and current city small-business development chief) Jackie James, sister to current Hill Alder Latrice James, who represents the residents of Advanced. Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker and even Mayor Toni Harp got calls.

The ask? Do something.

Clyburn, Porter and Latrice James came to see for themselves what residents were enduring.

“Are you still cold?” Clyburn asked a resident sitting in a wheelchair covered in a blanket. The lights were out in his room, but his door was open. He nodded solemnly and closed his eyes.

UNITE HERE organizer Shirley Lawrence (pictured above) had received an anonymous tip about the heat being out, so she made a beeline to the nursing home. Her mother, Viola Yarbrough, lives on the third floor and has been a resident of the complex for eight years.

“Her face is so cold,” Lawerence said of her mother, who was swaddled in blankets up to her chin. In addition to keeping vigil over her own mother, Lawerence said she’d made it a point to go to the second floor and check on the mother of a friend. The heat was apparently working fine on that floor. It also seemed to be working on another part of the third floor nearest the center’s elevators.

The heating problem appeared to be isolated to the third floor wing.

“We went through the same thing last year,” Foskey-Cyrus said of the problem with proper heating. ​“They claimed to have straightened it out.”

“They had all summer to fix this,” Clyburn added. Clyburn had written to the previous administrator of the complex almost a year ago enumerating similar problems with heating almost a year ago, but she said a state inspection found nothing wrong with the facility.

Many of the nurses made their rounds Wednesday night wearing their winter coats. One said that maintaining a comfortable temperature for residents on the third floor is an ongoing issue. It is often chilly during the winter months and sweltering in the summer time, she said.

An Ongoing Issue

When State Rep. Porter arrived on scene at almost 9 p.m. she was flabbergasted that their was no one from Advanced on site, getting to the bottom of why there were residents without heat on a cold night for several hours.

By this time, LCI’s Alvarado and Ramos had been at the complex for several hours taking heat readings and checking furnaces.

“So there’s no one in charge?” Porter asked incredulously.

“Jesus is,” Foskey-Cyrus said. ​“Jesus take the wheel.”

All the elected officials in the room listened as Brown regaled them with stories of not only cold nights, but of bold rodents that he said laughed at the visible mice traps set for them under the rooms sole heating unit and were brazen enough to scurry about during the day.

Foskey-Cyrus said she once watched a mouse scurry across the floor with a trap stuck to its tail.

Lawerence showed Porter a cold, empty dinning room where one of the heating units was in fact an empty shell that instead housed all manner of dirt and debris, which left her shaking her head.

A Promise To Do Better

After a failed attempt to get the heating system to deliver some warm air, Foskey-Cyrus, Clyburn and Porter trooped back downstairs to meet up with Latrice James and Advanced Administrator Showstead.

They wasted no time letting him know how they felt about people having no heat on a winter night. Showstead said that he had checked the heat before he left at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and had determined it to be at the required level. Staff and patients contradicted his claim.

“The people you’re housing here and your staff said it’s been cold all day and that there are mice running out in broad daylight like the own the” facility, Porter said. ​“These are health conditions we’re talking about here including the heat. I understand the heat is important and it should be a priority because it’s night time and it’s cold, but you’ve got other things going on here.”

Showstead said he wasn’t aware of any such complaints about problems with mice or hot water, but he was willing to address the problems that the officials raised.

James asked and Showstead agreed to meet with the officials to follow up on the problems at a later date.

At nearly midnight, Ramos, who had sent out for tea and coffee while he waited to see whether the ailing heating system could muster a last gasp of warmth, declared that it was heating rooms to about 70 degrees and that would be enough to get residents through the night.

“We’ll be back here tomorrow,” he said.

Thursday morning Brown reported by text that temperatures plummeted again overnight after everyone left.

“There’s still no heat,” he reported. ​“It’s actually colder.”