Residents of a Toronto Community Housing building on Humber Blvd. were looking for places to spend Sunday night after a weekend of sloshing around in filthy water.
Multiple radiators have broken since Friday, causing flooding on different floors of 121 Humber Blvd., in the Keele Street and Weston Road area of North York.
Some residents have spent the past few days trying to rescue their belongings by moving them to higher ground.
Frances Archibald, meanwhile, is looking for a place to spend the night.
“Friday it was next door, coming through my apartment. This morning it’s my bedroom,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”
Sara Goldvine, a TCH spokesperson, blamed renovations in a laundry room that “put pressure on an aging system.”
“These radiators were bursting in an unpredictable pattern over a period of time,” she said.
At least one of the burst radiators was in a vacant unit, making the flooding worse than it might have been, she added.
TCH has staff on site making sure residents are “supported,” she said.
Problems from aging infrastructure are nothing new for the housing corporation that provides subsidized housing to 60,000 Toronto families.
According to the TCH website, the average age of its 2,000-plus buildings is 42 years.
Although it has a plan to spend $2.6 billion fixing buildings over the next 10 years, it’s only about one-third funded so far. The City of Toronto has committed $864 million over 10 years, but TCH says it needs the same amount from the provincial and federal governments to get the buildings fixed.
