SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Donny Besler awoke on the morning of June 12 to a dank smell, swollen baseboards and a stain creeping from beneath his couch. Within a few hours, he said, there were little black spiders crawling around the apartment.

After two apartment floods and no sign of his carpet being cleaned, tenant Donny Besler says he's done with Northern Properties. - Mark Rendell/NNSL photo

It was the second time Besler's first-floor bachelor suit in Northern Properties Sandstone South building had flooded. Only a few months earlier, he said, pipes ruptured in the laundry room on the second floor letting water seep down through the walls and into his living room.

It's been more than a month since this second flood and Besler, a meat cutter at the Co-op, said he's given up trying to get anything from Northern Properties and is moving out.

Besler said he asked Northern Property to shampoo, deodorize and disinfect the carpet after the first flood.

"Whether you sit or lay down at night to go to bed you can smell that carpet," he said.

His request was largely ignored.

"They ripped it up off the floor without taking up the baseboards," he said, "sucked up whatever they could and brought in these huge fans."

The fans were left running for several days then removed, he said. The smell, he said, lingered on and his closet door was left swollen with water damage - a state it remained in when Yellowknifer visited the apartment.

When the second flood came in June, Besler said he was adamant that Northern Property deal with the carpet this time around.

"For them to just come in and pull up the carpets and put down the fans, that's not going to work for me," he said. "It's starting to stink and now I have black spiders for Pete's sake!"

The fans arrived on June 13 while Besler was at work, he said, along with a note explaining the carpets would be cleaned and deodorized.

Besler said he called the health inspector, Jeremy Roberts, to try to build up a case to take to the rental office. According to Besler, Roberts indicated that the situation posed no immediate health risk and that the fans along with the note were sufficient proof that Northern Properties was taking the appropriate steps.

"Issues like floods or insects we don't consider health hazards," Roberts told Yellowknifer. "Even mould we don't consider a health hazard."

"It can be stressful and it can certainly be inconvenient," he said, "but I can't declare it a health hazard."

He added, however, that a flood should be dealt with within several days or mould can start growing.

Within a week the fans were gone, said Besler, and the carpet was still not clean.

At this point, Besler said he considered making a complaint with the NWT Rental Office, but was offered a different apartment by Northern Properties in Sandstone North building, across the parking lot.

When he went to check out the new apartment he was horrified, he said.

"It looked they had gutted a couch. There was foam, hair, dirt, dust, filthy," he said. "It stunk worse then my place."

This was the final straw, said Besler, and he decided to move.

"They have total disrespect for the tenants," he said. "You should be able to come home to a nice place, it doesn't have to be beautiful, just livable.

"It would be different if these were isolated incidents," he said, "but it's all the time, it's one thing after another."

His hallway lights had gone out several times, he said, and the light in the stairwell was out for more than a month.

"You couldn't even see the mailbox key." he said.

There was a loud beeping noise in the hallway when Yellowknifer visited to the Sandstone South building - Besler said it had been going nonstop for several weeks.

"If there were proper caretakers in the building, and they did the rounds and checks, that would have been spotted," he said.

"I'm discouraged that this is the way we live," he said.

A Northern Properties representative in Yellowknife refused to comment on this issue and the company did not return calls.

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