I am on a co-op board in a high-rise NYC building, and found out that a few years ago the building manager worked with a contractor to hide an illegal gas repair from the board for months. During a project to replace our radiator pipes, a plumber noticed that a connection on the main gas line had a leak that was previously "fixed" by someone smearing a big wad of grease over the leak. Apparently that illegal fix occured a long time earlier.
The contractors told the manager about the grease-repair, and instead of telling the board the manager worked with this plumbing contractor to hide the condition for six months while they worked out a plan. Eventually the manager told the board that our gas main needed replacement, but never mentioned the leak. He had a pretty clever plan in mind to not repair anything but instead just install new pipes parallel to the old ones, and then bottle the building and do a rapid switchover from the old pipes to the new pipes in one day with DOB and ConEd present, to avoid a long gas outage. Of course they never told DOB or ConEd about the leak. The plumber and manager were apparently working on this plan over those six months. Clever yes, but when I found out from our super that the manager hid this dangerous condition for months I became livid. The super got into a dispute with the manager and showed me evidence of this gas issue, which is pretty compelling.
Of course we need to fire the manager. That's obvious. My question is: was it illegal of the manager or contractor to knowingly keep the gas running with grease as the only thing stopping a leak? Did they violate the law or was it just unethical to not tell us? Is there any agency that should be informed about this, assuming we have enough proof of what happened?
The contractors told the manager about the grease-repair, and instead of telling the board the manager worked with this plumbing contractor to hide the condition for six months while they worked out a plan. Eventually the manager told the board that our gas main needed replacement, but never mentioned the leak. He had a pretty clever plan in mind to not repair anything but instead just install new pipes parallel to the old ones, and then bottle the building and do a rapid switchover from the old pipes to the new pipes in one day with DOB and ConEd present, to avoid a long gas outage. Of course they never told DOB or ConEd about the leak. The plumber and manager were apparently working on this plan over those six months. Clever yes, but when I found out from our super that the manager hid this dangerous condition for months I became livid. The super got into a dispute with the manager and showed me evidence of this gas issue, which is pretty compelling.
Of course we need to fire the manager. That's obvious. My question is: was it illegal of the manager or contractor to knowingly keep the gas running with grease as the only thing stopping a leak? Did they violate the law or was it just unethical to not tell us? Is there any agency that should be informed about this, assuming we have enough proof of what happened?