{"id":719684,"date":"2026-04-11T04:23:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T04:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/719684\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T04:23:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T04:23:34","slug":"nyc-to-require-more-cooling-tower-inspections-after-legionnaires-disease-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/719684\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC to require more cooling tower inspections after Legionnaires’ disease cases"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat\u2019s free New York City newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New York City property owners with working cooling towers \u2014 the cylinder rooftop structures spiking the city\u2019s skyline \u2014 will soon be required to step up their testing for the Legionella bacterium.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the city\u2019s latest effort to prevent outbreaks of Legionnaires\u2019 disease, which killed at least seven people in Harlem last summer. <\/p>\n

A spokesman for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said Friday the new cooling tower regulations go into effect on May 8 citywide. The rules were published in the City Record, a database of records and notices that includes public hearings and agendas, on Wednesday, and registered tower operators were notified. Property owners will also face higher fines for noncompliance.<\/p>\n

The final rules were shared with all elected officials and community boards citywide Thursday.<\/p>\n

The new regulations come after the City Council in October approved legislation to ramp up requirements for testing building cooling towers for Legionella microbes. In the past, cooling tower operators were required to conduct Legionella sampling every 90 days. <\/p>\n

Building owners will now need to test for the presence of Legionella at least every month when the cooling towers are in use, which is generally during warmer weather months. The bill further requires that all such testing be performed by, or under the supervision of, a \u201cqualified\u201d professional.<\/p>\n

Legionnaires\u2019 disease is a severe form of pneumonia caused by the Legionella bacterium. It spreads through airborne water droplets, not by drinking water or through person-to-person spread. Many of the outbreaks in New York City are caused by water vapor spewing from rooftop cooling towers. <\/p>\n

Harlem has high risk factors for Legionnaires\u2019 disease<\/p>\n

Central Harlem was the center of a Legionnaires\u2019 outbreak last summer<\/a> in which health officials say at least seven people died and more than 100 were sickened, many of them hospitalized. The outbreak was linked to contaminated cooling towers at several locations, including Harlem Hospital, which also had an outbreak in 2021. In that case, health officials determined the facility had not properly managed one of its cooling towers in accordance with local law.<\/p>\n

Last month, Gothamist reported <\/a>that Harlem Hospital ignored its own cooling tower maintenance plan in the weeks before last year\u2019s outbreak when it failed to conduct rapid, weekly tests for Legionella.<\/p>\n

In a separate Harlem case, two residents in one of the city\u2019s largest residential complexes were diagnosed with Legionnaires\u2019 disease, prompting local health officials in January to open an investigation. <\/p>\n

Residents were advised to take baths or sponge baths instead of showers so that they wouldn\u2019t breath in contaminated mist. <\/p>\n

Harlem is particularly vulnerable to Legionnaires\u2019 outbreaks, because of its high density of tall buildings with cooling towers, and the concentration of chronic disease \u2014 a risk factor for Legionnaires\u2019 \u2014 in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. The health department has also cited historic disinvestment and structural racism as factors.<\/p>\n

Legionnaires\u2019 disease tends to emerge more frequently in neighborhoods with older populations and higher rates of poverty, according to health officials. From 2019 to 2022, the city\u2019s highest annual Legionnaires\u2019 disease rates were concentrated in parts of Harlem and the Bronx. Among residents with Legionnaires\u2019 disease in that period, more than 90% had at least one chronic medical condition, and more than 50% were previous or current smokers.<\/p>\n

In what seemed like an odd anomaly to Harlem residents, city health inspectors in February found two tenants with Legionnaires\u2019 disease in an apartment building on the Upper East Side. <\/p>\n

\u201cI started to believe that Legionella only knew Black and brown neighborhoods,\u201d Marquis Harrison, chair of Manhattan\u2019s Community Board 10 in Harlem, said March 31 on a panel with city health officials hosted by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. \u201cWe only saw it in the South Bronx and in Harlem, and only communities of color. We were having these outbreaks. \u2026 Maybe it doesn\u2019t just exist in our neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Preliminary budget includes more inspectors<\/p>\n

The city held public hearings after last summer\u2019s outbreak.<\/p>\n

Health officials testified last September that they needed more inspectors to strengthen oversight and enforcement and hiring has begun. Speaking about the preliminary budget<\/a> before the City Council\u2019s Health Committee on March 20, health officials said that when fully staffed, the department will have about 56 scientists and water ecologists to oversee work related to the inspections. The city has some 6,000 cooling towers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe additional staffing that we got will enable us to conduct the annual inspection and any follow-up that\u2019s needed of every cooling tower in the city, which, as you know, has been our goal,\u201d said Corinne Schiff, deputy commissioner of the environmental health division in the health department.<\/p>\n

The preliminary budget plan notes that the health department is devoting more money toward community outreach, cooling tower inspections, disease surveillance and laboratory testing. In the budget hearing, chief financial officer and deputy commissioner Aaron Anderson said $9 million will go toward surveillance and testing in the fiscal year 2027, along with 50 employees. Another $2.5 million will be devoted to the cooling tower inspections and 28 employees, and community outreach efforts will receive $1.1 million and 15 employees. <\/p>\n

The outbreak has prompted lawsuits against the city and the construction firms involved in maintaining the cooling towers, with the backing of civil rights lawyer Ben Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton. In his lawsuit, Crump alleged that the city failed to learn that water towers were unregistered or went uninspected. He also argued that the official death toll was an undercount.<\/p>\n

The seven people who died last summer have not been publicly identified. <\/p>\n

Harrison said their names may have been lost in the confusion surrounding the summer outbreak. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very sad for us, because the community couldn\u2019t send their condolences or even celebrate their lives,\u201d Harrison told Healthbeat on Friday, adding that he would renew his request to learn more about the people who died.<\/p>\n

At the March budget hearing, City Council Health Committee Chair <\/b>Lynn Schulman asked Schiff if the health department required further help.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you need additional resources to prevent future outbreaks?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe program is to promote compliance with the rigorous requirements that New York City has, and as we discussed in the fall, that is designed as a prevention measure,\u201d Schiff said. \u201cWe can\u2019t commit that nothing bad will ever happen again.\u201d <\/p>\n

Trenton Daniel<\/a> is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org or on the messaging app Signal<\/a> at trentondaniel.88.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat\u2019s free New York City newsletter here. New York City property…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":719685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,5231,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,258672,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-719684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-harlem","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-rooftops","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116384170479426530","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}