City Council Passes Bill Boosting Legionnaire’s Testing

In the wake of a terrifying Legionnaire’s outbreak that sickened 114 people in Harlem between July 25 and Aug. 29, killing seven, the New York City Council has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require more stringent testing for the disease.

The bill’s passage comes after reports revealed lax Legionnaire’s testing, when measured relative to other years, on the part of the Adams administration.

A Gothamist reported revealed that seven of 10 buildings linked to the outbreak—which was concentrated in the ZIP codes 10027, 10030, 10035, 10037, and 10039—had not been tested for a year, while the city’s health department lost nearly a third of its hired inspectors despite a funding boost. The city has since taken steps to turn things around, with the same media outlet reporting earlier this month that they’ve seen a 25 percent boost in inspector head count.

Intro 1390-A, which received a vote of 45 to 2 and was sponsored by Queens Council Member Lynn Schulman, is probably best defined by its summary on the City Council website: “[The] bill would amend New York City’s cooling tower testing requirements by requiring building owners to test cooling towers for the presence of microbes at least as frequently as every month during periods of the year such cooling towers are in use.”

A cooling tower atop a building helps to regulate the air inside the building.

“The bill would also require building owners to perform a biocide treatment of each cooling tower during warm weather when there is an increased risk of legionella growth, as determined by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH),” the summary continues. Reporting requirements will also be strengthened.

The bill is oriented around cooling towers because of their possibly singular capacity to start Legionnaire’s outbreaks, including the recent Harlem one, which was traced back to towers situated at both the city-owned NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem and a nearby construction site. Legionella bacteria, which spreads through infected water vapor and is not communicable, thrives in the sort of warm water that coalesces in the basins of the towers.

Two patients affected by the recent outbreak, who worked at separate infected construction sites, have now filed negligence suits against the contractors Skanska USA and Rising Sun Construction; Duane Headley and Nunzio Quinto are receiving high-profile support from civil rights heavyweights including Al Sharpton and the lawyer Ben Crump.

Injury attorney Robert Kattner—who, while not representing Headley and Quinto, has represented other Legionnaire’s patients—elaborated on how to eradicate the disease in an August interview with Our Town. “If [landlords] treat the water regularly with bleach, or some bactericide, it gets the Legionella levels down to a safe amount,” he said at the time.

Without proper testing and treatment, Kattner added, “anybody in the neighborhood just walking by could be exposed to Legionella. You don’t even need to live in that building.”

For those curious about whether they lived near (or in) an infection site during the July-August outbreak, the following buildings tested positive for Legionnaire’s:

*BRP Companies, Lafayette Development LLC, 2239 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., Manhattan, NY 10037

*BVK, 215 W. 125th St., Manhattan, NY 10027

*Commonwealth Local Development, 301 W. 124th St., Manhattan, NY 10035

*CUNY – City College Marshak Science Building, 181 Convent Ave., Manhattan, NY 10031

*Harlem Center Condo, 317 Lenox Ave., Manhattan, NY 10030

*NYC Economic Development Corporation, 40 W. 137th St., Manhattan, NY 10037

*NYC Health Department Central Harlem Sexual Health Clinic, 2238 Fifth Ave., Manhattan, NY 10030

*NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem, 506 Lenox Ave., Manhattan, NY 10037

*The New York Hotel Trades Council Harlem Health Center, 133 Morningside Ave., Manhattan, NY 10027

*Wharton Properties, 100 W. 125th St., Manhattan, NY 10027