Ida Goldstein, whose husband Robert died of Legionnaires’ disease during this summer’s outbreak on the Upper East Side, told a City Council hearing on Wednesday about how his condition deteriorated over weeks, spiraling from a 104-degree fever to kidney failure and then life support.
“My heart was breaking watching him suffer,” Goldstein said of her husband, who died in July at 88. “I’m heartbroken.”
Goldstein testified before the City Council’s health committee in the aftermath of this summer’s Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on the Upper East Side, which killed 11 people. Councilmembers questioned health officials about their handling of the outbreak, which started in early July and ended in late August.
City lawmakers are considering new legislation aimed at preventing outbreaks and improving the city’s response to those that do occur. The severe respiratory illness is spread by airborne, bacteria-tainted water droplets from rooftop cooling towers. An outbreak in Harlem in summer 2025 claimed seven lives.
New measures under consideration by councilmembers include creating pop-up testing centers for Legionnaires’ disease during outbreaks and conducting more public outreach, as well as ensuring officials have an accurate list of all cooling towers in the city.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration on Tuesday announced its own slate of initiatives for addressing the growing risk of Legionnaires’ outbreaks, which researchers contend will occur with increased frequency due to climate change.
But most of Wednesday’s hearing was dedicated to questioning Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin and two of his deputies.
The inquiries primarily revolved around the agency’s inspection of cooling towers, which serve buildings’ air conditioning systems and are the primary vector for the disease, with some questioning why more cooling tower inspectors weren’t on the job ahead of the outbreak.
Martin largely stood behind what he described as the agency’s aggressive response to the outbreak, which included rapid testing of all cooling towers in the three Upper East Side ZIP codes for Legionella, the bacteria that causes the disease.
He also highlighted the agency’s transparency in publicly identifying buildings whose cooling towers tested positive on both the PCR tests, which detects living and dead bacteria, as well as on culture tests, which take two weeks to produce results but only detect living bacteria.
“We did not wait two weeks to act,” Martin said. He reiterated that the agency required the building owners responsible for the 83 cooling towers that tested positive to immediately drain, clean and disinfect their towers.
“That is a more aggressive strategy than our city has ever taken,” Martin said.
Health Committee Chair Lynn Schulman acknowledged that the city health department’s outreach efforts and transparency improved since last year; the agency did not publish the same information during the summer outbreak in Central Harlem.
But she said that the health department could do more to prevent future outbreaks.
“The agency needs to show the same level of commitment to preventative enforcement 365 days a year,” she said. “This cannot be the new norm.”