Plumbing Problem No Fun for Single Senior

Trudy Schwartz is in a little hot water.

She’s been that way for 16 months. And that’s not cool.

Literally.

She turns on the cold water spigot from her kitchen faucet in her Winrock Villas condominium, and, well, there’s nothing cold about it.

“It’s infuriating,” she fumes in her genteel but firm way.

Schwartz is also genteel but firm when she waves off my question about her age.

“Just say I’m a senior of advanced years,” she says with a wry smile.

We are sitting in Schwartz’s immaculate home in one of the city’s largest and oldest condo complexes, consisting of 26 buildings and 292 units on the backside of the old Winrock mall.

She’s lived alone here for 15 years, and, for the most part, it’s been a pleasant place to be.

We’ve already tested her kitchen water, and today it is coming in only lukewarm.

“It’s erratic some days recently,” she says. “But it’s still a problem.”

So much of a problem that, since the cold turned hot (and the hot stayed hot, incidentally) in mid-April 2011, she has written Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry to complain and had seven plumbers, two city Code Enforcement inspectors, the condo board president and vice president and a lawyer out to assess the situation.

So far, though, the cold is still hot most days — and, she notes, the cold water in the bathroom is starting to inch up in temperature as well.

“Soon, I’ll have no cold water at all,” she frets.

So she’s called in me. And she has filed a complaint in state District Court against Winrock Villas, seeking relief and damages, but mostly just a plumber capable of giving her back her cold water.

David Gonzales, the attorney representing Winrock Villas, declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate to speak about pending litigation.

But Pat McMullan, former condo board president, was quite willing to spill.

“I like Ms. Schwartz, don’t misunderstand, but her lawsuit has no merit,” says McMullan, a real estate agent who manages several of the condo units as rentals. He says he had dealt with Schwartz for months, until he stepped down as president five months ago. “There’s no way Winrock Villas or any other place can control how cold the cold water comes into a unit any more than the man in the moon can. I took her complaint seriously, but I can’t waste time on a problem I can’t solve.”

He can’t recall any similar complaints from other tenants. “She’s a nice lady,” he says. “But she’s lonely.”

McMullan says he suggested Schwartz keep a pitcher of water chilling in the refrigerator or purchase bottled water.

Schwartz, a former New Yorker, has been widowed for decades. Her only son and his family live out of state. She had been independent and active until a car crash with an uninsured driver in January 2011 totaled her vehicle and left her hobbled enough to require using a walker.

“I don’t go out as often as I used to,” she says.

But loneliness does not explain the tests performed on her water to determine temperature and location of the problem — which, for now, the plumbers say, is somewhere beyond her unit, possibly caused by a leak of one pipe into another, a commingling somewhere of the hot and cold lines or excessive heat from the sun.

Which is to say, no one really knows.

She believes the problem began soon after a plumbing crew shut down the water in the complex for maintenance.

“They made some sort of mistake,” she says. “Why else would this have happened?”

Her cold water has registered between 77 and 80 degrees from the faucet, according to the documents she keeps in her case. By comparison, the average temperature of cold tap water is 54 degrees.

Schwartz says condo management suggested installing a “water chiller” under the sink. But all the various styles she was shown were too large for her modest-sized kitchen and did not address the latest issue of hot water from the cold bathroom faucet.

Schwartz worries that the powers that be are simply waiting her out. She is a senior of advanced years, after all. Who knows, she says, how much longer she will be around to keep up her heated battle?

Trial in her case is set for Oct. 23 before District Judge Valerie Huling. For Schwartz, that seems a long, cold wait. Just not cold enough.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal