Uptown Lawmaker's Bill To Reform Cooling Tower Inspections Passes

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Council voted to pass a package of bills that will reform the city's cooling tower inspection protocol to require more strict and transparent reporting of inspection results, an uptown lawmaker announced.

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez introduced the reform bill following two deadly Legionnaires' Disease outbreaks in Washington Heights last year. The bill will require the city Department of Buildings and Department of Health to present an annual report of cooling tower inspection results to the city council and post the results of inspections online.

"From last summer until the end of 2018, many in my district and in surrounding neighborhoods in Northern Manhattan were hospitalized, and a few lives taken, by Legionnaire's disease, spread through infected cooling towers," Rodriguez said in a statement.

"Jointly with my Council colleagues, we called for greater transparency to address how and why this bacterial disease spread so rapidly to water-cooling towers and called for more inspections."

The city's annual report must include information on:

• The number of new cooling tower registrations;
• The number of certifications showing that a cooling tower has been inspected and cleaned;
• The number of tests conducted at a cooling tower for the presence of bacteria;
• The number of inspections a cooling tower received, including the number of violations linked to each specific cooling tower.

City officials traced the source of two fatal Legionnaires' Disease outbreaks in 2018 — one in July and the other in October — to cooling towers at the residential building the Sugar Hill Project on St. Nicholas Avenue near West 155th Street. The outbreaks sickened 59 people, killing two, city Health Department officials said in November.

The 2018 outbreaks were the first time that one cooling tower has been linked to two separate Legionnaires' Disease outbreaks in the city, health officials said.