Lillie Crockett’s life has been a giant, hassle-filled question mark since the evening of January 14 — when frozen water pipes burst at the 252-unit Heritage House Apartments in Midtown St. Louis, forcing the evacuation of Crockett and 119 fellow residents.
Crockett, 86, spent the next week at the Hilton at the Ballpark. Then, on Sunday she was bused to the Hilton St. Louis Airport, where she was told that she would be on her own in less than five days, with the need to find new housing by January 30.
“I’m very stressed,” Crockett said Thursday in a hotel meeting room filled with donated food, water and sanitary supplies. “Someone had to call me this morning to get me out of bed.”
But Crockett received a dose of good news shortly after she uttered those words. Word came down that the evacuees would be able to stay at the hotel another week longer, until February 6.
Even so, she’s unsure where she’ll live after that, or how to retrieve any of the larger items, such as a sofa and bed, left behind in the apartment she’s lived in for the past 13 years.
“Just give me my fireplace, my TV and my pictures on the wall,” she said.
Sansone Property Management Company, which oversees Heritage House, had previously arranged to put residents up at the Hilton and was paying for their stay. But the company sent a letter to the evacuees on Monday, January 23, informing them they had until January 30 to stay at the Hilton, after which time they could stay there at their own expense.
Sansone representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment.
The Heritage House tenants will be refunded their current month’s rent, as well as any deposit they had made on their apartments, according to Marquetta Hamell, the on-site property manager.
Heritage House, an 18-story building at 2800 Olive Street, has been condemned and will remain closed for at least a year, Hamell said.
Action St. Louis, a tenant rights group, has been coordinating relief operations at the Hilton. On Thursday, group representatives were going door-to-door to check on the food and medical needs of tenants, most of whom are elderly and disabled, says Kennard Williams, the group’s organizing manager.
The situation is improving for most of the evacuees, but problems remain for those seeking to retrieve major possessions. Tenants have been given only 15 minutes to fetch valuables, Williams says.
“They got to get access at some point,” he says. “They got to get their belongings in a real amount of time. Because 15 minutes ain’t enough.”
A woman who identified herself as a family member of one of the evacuees tells the RFT that a major source of stress is the pushback the tenants have been getting from providers of renter’s insurance.
“And so we got hundreds of seniors who’ve been paying monthly to insurance companies,” says the woman, who asked not to be identified. “And they’re now saying they won’t cover the claims. They’re determining it’s not an act of nature.”
A woman interviewed in the parking lot of Heritage House — who identified herself as the friend of a longtime resident in her 80s — said she had heard the pipes had started freezing on January 13, when the heat went out in the building in the midst of a bitter cold snap, when night temperatures sank below zero.
“What we heard is the windows got left open on the 11th floor the day before the freeze,” the woman says. “It was an empty unit. That froze the pipes.”
A few days after the frozen pipes burst at Heritage House, broken pipes at the Mark Twain Building complex on North 9th Street led to the evacuation of 213 tenants.
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