AUGUSTA — The city on Thursday shut down a three-unit Eastern Avenue apartment building where the tenants said they’d been living since early February with no water and only partial heat in the building.

A neighbor said tenants filled up buckets of snow and brought them inside to melt so they could use the water to flush their toilets, according to Robert Overton, code enforcement officer.

The city ordered the tenants – four adults – to leave the building, and put them up in an Augusta hotel until it can help them find more-permanent housing. As of Thursday afternoon, Overton said he had been unable to reach the building owner, Steve Gass, who has a Florida address on city assessing records.

Overton said that, according to tenants, around the beginning of winter more than half of the building lost its heating system. Then, sometime in January, the pipes in the basement froze, forcing water to the building to be shut off.

“So we’ve had people living in the building, since November, without heat and since sometime in early February without water,” Overton said. “It’s alarming they lived in the apartments as long as they did in these conditions.”

One unit of the blue-shingled apartment building at 709 Eastern Ave. was vacant. But one apartment was occupied by one adult and the other apartment was occupied by three adults.

The one-person apartment still had heat but the three-person apartment had no working heating system, though the tenants did have electric space heaters they provided themselves.

Overton said the tenants said it was getting difficult to pay their electric bill, which was elevated from the cost of running the space heaters.

Tenants told Overton their landlord had offered them a $100 reduction in rent in exchange for not having heat or water, and told them he’d get the heat and water functioning again when he returned to Maine, in about a month.

Overton said the city was made aware of the issues at the building by a caseworker who had visited one of the tenants. Overton said the city offered all the tenants hotel rooms if they agreed to vacate the property. They agreed to leave, but hesitantly, as they were concerned about finding permanent housing after having to leave the building.

The tenants were allowed to keep their belongings in the building, and agreed not to stay there.

Overton said he will post the building as unfit for occupancy and a number of improvements will need to be made to the building for it to be reoccupied.

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