Four Upper East Side buildings that tested positive for live Legionella bacteria were not in compliance with a city law requiring property owners to submit monthly test results of their cooling systems to the health department, records reviewed by The City Reporter show.
The bacteria is usually found in water towers that are part of building cooling systems and is transmitted via vapor wafting through the air. Starting in May, the city began requiring building owners to test their cooling towers for Legionella every 30 days.
The current Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that has sickened 84 people, including five patients who died, prompted the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to test more than 180 cooling towers in the neighborhood.
Fifty buildings within the zip codes of 10028, 10075 and 10128 came back with positive test results for the presence of live Legionella, the bacteria that triggers the potentially deadly Legionnaires’ Disease, including four that records show weren’t in compliance with city testing laws.
Records show the non-profit athletic complex Asphalt Green at 1750 York Ave. and a building connected to the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewett Design Museum at 9 E. 90th St. have no record of prior testing on file with the department.
A spokesperson for Asphalt Green, Oliver Sampson, offered a statement contrary to the health department records, providing records from a private vendor indicating the site had been tested in May and June as required and that all the results came up negative for Legionella bacteria.
The Health Department has no record of those findings, and a spokesperson stated their test found live Legionella in an Asphalt Green cooling tower.
On Thursday a spokesperson for Cooper Hewitt did not address the issue of non-compliance but stated that during the health department’s recent testing sweep of the area, one of its cooling towers tested positive on July 12.
“Out of an abundance of caution and to take mitigation and preventive steps around the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on the Upper East Side, Cooper Hewitt was closed to the public on Monday and Tuesday. The cleaning of the cooling towers has now been completed, and the museum reopened to the public Wednesday.”
A 96-unit co-op at 145 E. 84th St. and a 19-unit apartment building at 1486 Lexington Ave. have two cooling towers each. At both sites, one tower was recently tested. But the second tower at the Lexington Avenue locale was last tested in October, and the second tower at the E. 84th St. site has no record of prior testing at all.
Building managers at both locations did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Staffing Shortages
The health department has struggled to respond to the weekslong outbreak amid critical vacancies within the unit that investigates reports of the bacteria. Those specialists, known as water ecologists, are also tasked with ensuring that building owners are complying with the monthly reporting requirements.
The health department has only 35 water ecologists on staff out of an approved headcount of 56, The City Reporter revealed this week, though the agency is currently onboarding more than a dozen of the highly-skilled scientists.
The City Reporter found that more than 500 cooling towers across Manhattan were not in compliance with the 30-day self-reported testing requirement.
Council Speaker Julie Menin, whose district includes the Upper East Side, has been critical of the Mamdani administration’s response to the outbreak from the start.
On Tuesday, she announced a bill she planned to introduce that would apply a pandemic-like urgency to Legionnaires’ disease — including more inspections and a hotline where New Yorkers could call for updates. She already called for an emergency hearing on the outbreak scheduled for September.
She slammed the health department for not disinfecting all of the cooling towers earlier in July, when the cases first began to grow.
“The decision was not made to proactively disinfect either the 25% that were non-compliant, where we know that no test results were provided, or the area surrounding the epicenter where there were a tremendous amount of cases and we had urged — just go in and start proactively disinfect them,” she said at a press conference Tuesday.
“What are we waiting for?”
She also penned an op-ed for the New York Post, where she demanded “real answers” from the mayor’s administration.
“Legionnaires’ disease is no mystery. We know how it spreads, and we know how to reduce the risk,” she wrote.
“But even though the council strengthened the law months ago, the administration failed to match those reforms with the urgency, transparency and leadership New Yorkers need.”
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