City Hall has fallen behind on testing Big Apple cooling towers where the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease tends to fester.
The new measure calls for a COVD-like public education campaign, stepped up inspections of buildings that have not conducted cooling tower inspections, and a Legionnaires’ hotline to keep New Yorkers informed of the latest news and concerns.
“We have so many questions that still remain unanswered,” Menin said. “The past few weeks have been a very tense and difficult time for the East Side of Manhattan. We know that at least 76 people have been infected in the latest outbreak of Legionnaires’, and that seven of our neighbors remain hospitalized.
“The concern is that the health department opted not to proactively disinfect, to wait for test results to come back, particularly around the epicenter, where there were a lot of positive cases. ” Menin said an understaffed health department has fallen behind on testing Big Apple cooling towers used for air conditioning systems in large scale buildings — where outbreaks of the Legionella bacteria, which thrives in warm water, typically occur in the summer months.
“As the number of cases have increased, so have the number of concerns,” she said. “I’ve heard from so many constituents who lacked essential information on disease risk, on exposure, on prevention. ”All those buildings cleaned and disinfected their cooling towers, health officials said. The council has scheduled an oversight hearing in September to review the Mamdani administration’s preparation and response to the outbreak and determine why the public was kept in the dark.
In the aftermath, the council passed a law requiring building owners to test for the bacteria every 30 days during the hot season — but the city has fallen short.
“In the budget, the Department of Health is supposed to have twice the number of inspectors they had last year,” Lynn Schuman, who chairs the council’s Committee on Health, said Tuesday. “But they haven’t hired a lot of them. We don’t know if that’s the administration. We don’t know what’s happening.
”“I think those numbers are gonna creep up,” she said. “Not a lot, but they will creep up. ”
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