A Humble Basement Boiler Gets a Penthouse, Above Flood Level

Henry Gifford, the mechanical system designer who supervised the installation of this rooftop boiler at 334 East Eighth Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The basement boiler and electrical switch gear were flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and as winter approached that year, the building’s 30 apartments were without power, heat and hot water for weeks.

The association, which runs 37 buildings in the area, did not want a repeat. So it installed a new gas-fired boiler, but this time put it in an enclosure on the roof. The boiler began supplying heat and hot water last month.

Across the country, cellar-dwelling utilities are being moved farther and farther upstairs. In new buildings going up in identified flood plains, mechanical systems are being constructed at least several feet above expected flood levels. Even in existing buildings, plenty of retrofitting is underway.

Communities nationwide are embracing the accumulating evidence of climate change and fortifying buildings and infrastructure against rising sea levels and ever more intense storms. The New York Times is presenting case studies in resilient design, focused on New York City. The series, accompanied by a glossary, will look at steps being taken to resist floods, surges, high winds and heavy rains — steps that offer lessons to builders everywhere.

Basement boiler rooms made sense when coal was the principal fuel. Gravity could do a lot of the work of moving it from sidewalk to storage bin. Oil and gas have fueled heat and hot water boilers for many decades, however.

The smaller photograph shows what East Eighth Street looked like from the doorway of No. 334 immediately after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Built at the turn of the 20th century, No. 334 is two buildings in one: virtually identical “dumbbell” tenements — so called because they fill the width of the lot at either end but are narrower in the middle to create a light court.

Under Mayor David N. Dinkins, the city conveyed the building to what was then known as the Mutual Housing Partnership, to be renovated as housing for low- and moderate-income families. Enterprise Community Partners raised $665,228 from private investors to finance the project. (The investors benefited from a tax credit over 15 years.)

The Lower East Side has since become increasingly unaffordable to people of modest means. But at 334 East Eighth Street, eligible low-income families pay $719 to $1,098 a month for studio, one-, two- or three-bedroom apartments. These are families whose combined household income is 60 percent or less of the median in New York City, currently $90,600 a year for four people. Apartments are also set aside for medium-income families.

The building is three blocks from the East River and was identified on the federal flood map as being at risk of a 500-year flood; that is, a flood that stands a 0.2 percent chance of happening in any given year.

No one at 334 East Eighth Street had any notion how devastating Sandy would turn out to be.

One of the burner modules in the basement at 334 East Eighth Street before it was turned off for good.

The housing association faced immediate repair costs of about $2 million at 334 East Eighth Street and seven other damaged buildings. After two years, it received $1.2 million for repair and resilient design work at No. 334 through the city’s Build It Back program, financed by a federal disaster recovery block grant.

This was preferable to the approach of creating a watertight concrete enclosure around the basement boiler, given the height of the underground water table.

The rooftop was scarcely designed to accommodate a 50,000-pound boiler penthouse, so two steel I-beams were laid down, resting on the existing brick exterior walls. Steel joists were placed perpendicularly between the beams. The enclosure was constructed on that framework.

Since the rooftop boiler was turned on, the heat and hot water have been in steady supply.

There was another big problem. Each apartment had its own Con Ed meter in the basement, and there was no room upstairs for such a large array.

The answer was to convert to a single master Con Ed meter and 30 much smaller sub meters, allowing the entire installation to be placed in a small electrical closet off the first-floor public hallway.

It is no easy matter to retrofit a tenement from the turn of the 20th century, but the housing association sees no alternative.

Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/nyregion/new-york-basement-boiler-penthouse.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0