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The Adams administration wants to expand the Health Department’s capacity to inspect cooling towers atop buildings after an outbreak in Harlem—stemming from bacteria found in towers at two city-run properties—killed seven people.
Mayor Eric Adams wants to expand the city’s capacity to inspect buildings for Legionnaires’ disease, and strengthen penalties for property owners who fail to comply with cooling tower regulations, after an outbreak in Harlem killed seven people this summer and sickened more than a hundred others.
The Health Department on Friday said it had concluded its investigation into the cluster of Harlem cases, which officials said stemmed from cooling towers contaminated with Legionella bacteria at two city-run properties in the neighborhood (as the Daily News first reported): Harlem Hospital at 506 Lenox Ave., and a nearby construction site overseen by the NYC Economic Development Corporation at 40 West 137th St. Both sites have since been cleaned and remediated, officials said.
“We must ensure that we learn from this and implement new steps to improve our detection and response to future clusters,” Adams said in a statement Friday, calling the outbreak “an unfortunate tragedy.”
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, among the candidates running against Adams in November’s general election for mayor, has called for an independent probe of the incident, saying it “raises troubling questions about whether City agencies complied with their own inspection and enforcement standards.”
Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia caused by the bacteria Legionella, which can grow in stagnant water and sicken people who breathe contaminated water vapors (it cannot spread from person to person).
New York City building owners are currently required to register their properties’ cooling towers and monitor their water quality three times a week, according to the Health Department, which called the city’s regulations “among the most rigorous and protective laws” in the country.
But Health Department inspections of cooling towers dropped to a near-record low in the months before the Harlem outbreak, which the agency blamed on staff shortages, according to reporting by the news site Gothamist.
Mayor Adams on Friday proposed several measures to strengthen the city’s testing and enforcement mechanisms, including expanding the number of inspectors, requiring building owners to test for Legionella every 30 days during cooling tower operating periods instead of the current 90 days, and increasing fines for related violations.
Here’s what else happened this week—
ICYMI, from City Limits:
- Struggling to pay rent, or facing eviction from your apartment? City Limits spoke to experts about what tenants can do if they’ve fallen behind on their payments.
- More migrant youth—many of whom are or were recently living in city shelters—are seeking guidance on how to navigate their immigration hearings as the Trump administration continues to pursue courthouse arrests.
- Both the city and federal governments want to make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize people experiencing homelessness and mental health issues, but such policies “just push suffering out of view—until it resurfaces again, often worse,” writes op-ed author Josiah Haken, CEO of the homeless outreach group City Relief.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- About 3,100 families who get CityFHEPS housing vouchers will soon have to pay a higher portion of their income on rent, one of several reforms the city is making to rein in spending on the assistance program, The City reports.
- The Trump administration is moving ahead with the redevelopment of Penn Station, but no longer plans to tear down an entire Midtown block as part of the process, according to Gothamist.
- The City Council is demanding the NYPD stop surveilling public housing campuses via Big Apple Connect, the mayor’s free internet program, according to New York Focus. The newsroom’s reporting previously revealed how police have used the initiative to tap into video cameras at NYCHA buildings.
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