Ice Slab 9 Houses Long Makes Sidewalk A Deathtrap, Resident Says

PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — Nine Midwood Street houses and a slew of cars are locked in a massive block of ice — caused by a broken water main, city-wide deep freeze and a blocked storm drain — and the city has done nothing to fix it, despite repeated pleas from residents.

“It’s been pretty hellish,” said Victoria Fleary, who said she and her family were trapped inside their brownstone over the weekend after a six-foot-long slab of ice formed between their front steps and the curb.

“My husband and cousin both fell on the ice,” Fleary said, who also lives with her 6-year-old daughter and elderly mother-in-law. “We didn’t want to take the chance to go outside.”

Now Fleary — as well as her neighbors on Midwood Street between Rogers and Nostrand avenues — are frantically moving their valuables out their basements in preparation for the flood they except to come with an imminent thaw, caused by a blocked storm drain the city has yet to fix.

“All that water is primed to go right into our basement,” Fleary said. “And it’s so much water.”

Residents first realized the block was being flooded on Friday, when they tried to clear the streets after the bomb cyclone storm and discovered water kept gushing into the street, Fleary said.

And when an deep freeze fell over the city, the water froze into an 6-inch-think slab of ice that blanketed the streets and locked parked cars in their spots.

Fleary tried calling 311, 911, and local representatives, one of whom lives on her block, hoping to fix the massive sheet, but when 311 sent Department of Environmental Protection representatives out on Saturday, “all they did was look,” Fleary said.

A 911 representative directed Fleary to her local fire department who agreed “everything looked crazy” but there was “nothing they could do.”

Fleary's husband even tried knocking on her local assemblymember’s door, but the local represenative’s father shut the door on him, she said.

Finally, State Senator Kevin Parker called Fleary on Sunday and told her the problem was not a cracked hydrant — which residents first believed was the source of the flood — but a broken water main underneath the apartment building at 245 Midwood St., she said.

Parker told Fleary that the broken water main was the responsibility of the landlord — whose name is Dave Klein, according to city records — and he had been granted three days to fix it before the city could act.

But meanwhile, the ice has begun to melt and the storm drain that could help deter water from entering Fleary’s home is blocked by a car parked on top of it, locked in ice.

Fleary tried pleading with the city officials on social media to help locate the car’s owner, but the havoc-wreaking car remained locked in ice as of Monday afternoon, she said.

“When it warms up this week this will be disastrous,” Fleary wrote in a tweet addressed to 311 “Please HELP us....”

All Fleary can do now is move the boxes of her family’s possessions from the basement, and hope the impending flood doesn’t destroy her boiler, gas line, washer and dryer, and a room that has become an homage to her uncle-in-law, who passed away.

“His personal effects are all there,” Fleary said. “We’re afraid that they’ll be ruined.”

A DEP representative said the agency would send a crew to investigate the storm drain, but added the burst pipe did not fall under the agency's jurisdiction because it was on private property, writing, "They are responsible for maintenance and repair."

A representative from State Senator Kevin Parker's said his office would contact the Department of Sanitation the residents' behalf.

Photos courtesy of Victoria Fleary.