More than a third of positions in the health department unit dedicated to testing the city’s water supply for the Legionella bactria are unfilled, The City Reporter has learned, as health officials scramble to deal with a deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak that has so far killed three people and infected dozens.
Only 35 water ecologists — scientists who respond to positive tests for harmful bacteria including Legionella, which causes Legionnaire’s disease — are currently on staff despite an approved headcount of 56, according to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
The health department has struggled to hire the highly skilled scientists despite a $13 million budget boost to help the agency hire 23 new water ecologists. But months later a majority of those positions are still vacant: Fourteen are currently in the onboarding process while the agency works to recruit seven more.
Despite the vacancies, the health department has completed more cooling tower inspections this year than last, said agency spokesperson Chantal Gomez.
“In the first six months of this year, we completed 1,582 cooling tower inspections, a 35% increase compared to the same period last year,” said Gomez, noting that the agency has sampled more than 180 cooling towers.
Three people have died of Legionnaires’, a severe form of pneumonia, since the latest outbreak was discovered on the Upper East Side. Seven people died during an outbreak in Central Harlem last year. Older adults, smokers, and people with compromised immune systems are the most vulnerable to the disease.
Multiple buildings within a one-block radius of the 86th Street-Lexington Avenue express station tested positive to Legionnaires’ disease, July 13, 2026. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/The City Reporter
“We are now starting to see newly diagnosed patient cases come down associated to the Upper East Side Legionnaires’ disease community cluster,” Gomez said. “This suggests that the city’s aggressive remediation and enforcement is working as intended, and that the source of the exposure has likely been resolved.”
The disclosure of unfilled water ecologist jobs from the health department appears to validate warnings from the union representing the city’s public health professionals that the agency’s Legionnaires’ testing unit is critically understaffed.
Last week, Local 3005 of District Council 37 called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to speed up the department’s recruitment and hiring. Union local president Meghan Peterson told The City Reporter existing staff is burnt out from dealing with multiple public health emergencies this summer.
“There is a serious shortage of workers in this title due to low pay and poor working conditions,” the union wrote in a July 16 press release, referring to the water ecologists. “The worker shortage limits the city’s ability to adequately address this crisis.”
Health department officials told the City Council last September that the agency needed more inspectors to strengthen oversight after the fatal Legionnaires’ outbreak in Central Harlem last year. In a hearing before the Council’s health committee on March 19, the head of the agency’s environmental health division testified that the headcount boost authorized in the city’s budget would help control the next outbreak.
The Guggenheim Museum was one of more than 30 buildings around the Upper East Side that tested positive for Legionnaires’ disease, July 13, 2026. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/The City Reporter
“The additional staffing that we got will enable us to conduct the annual inspection and any follow-up that’s needed of every cooling tower in the city, which, as you know, has been our goal,” Corinne Schiff, the department’s deputy commissioner for environmental health, told lawmakers in March. “So, we’re very pleased about that… We are working very quickly to hire.”
Last week, The City Reporter revealed that hundreds of landlords and building managers had failed to submit required Legionella tests of their air conditioning cooling towers to the Department of Health since at least last year, and that 388 showed no record of submitting any test results at all.
New York’s staffing crisis is years in the making: the civil service exam process can add months or years to hiring new staff, and the city under Mayor Eric Adams bypassed an effort by Gov. Kathy Hochul that would help speed up hiring, New York Focus reported.
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