City health officials are still waiting to identify the site of the Upper East Side Legionnaires’ outbreak.<\/p>\n
At a City Council hearing, Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin told lawmakers to expect a DNA testing process to identify the location this fall.<\/p>\n
The hearing focused on whether city health officials were prepared for the outbreak after weeks of lawmakers’ criticism of the Mamdani administration. The outbreak sickened 94 people and 11 people died.<\/p>\n
Relatives of victims opened the hearing.<\/p>\n
“What he said to me was, ‘this was a completely preventable random act of violence that occurred to me,'” Daniel Thomas, whose father died of Legionnaires’ disease, said.<\/p>\n
Martin defended the administration’s handling of the outbreak. He said the city ordered remediation of cooling towers once officials received a positive test for Legionella bacteria, rather than wait to confirm whether the bacteria was live.<\/p>\n
“We ordered building owners to fully drain, clean, and disinfect their cooling towers, and all of them complied,” Martin said. “That is a more aggressive strategy than our city has ever taken.”<\/p>\n
But there was a discrepancy over the 56 positions for water ecologists who inspect cooling towers that were filled at the time. City Council Speaker Julie Menin said 21 positions were open.<\/p>\n
“We never should be in a position where, heading into a time when we know there’s going to be these types of Legionnaires’ outbreaks unfortunately, we want to make sure that every single one of these positions is filled,” she said.<\/p>\n
Martin said staffing was sufficient. Six positions are open today.<\/p>\n
“The majority of the positions that we needed were filled before this cluster,” he said.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the mayor’s absence from the Upper East Side during the outbreak was a point of contention.<\/p>\n
“Why didn’t he show up? He certainly was available, because he was performing for the cameras to say he was going to arrest Bibi Netanyahu,” said Councilwoman Joann Ariola, a Queens Republican.<\/p>\n
“We spoke every single day during this cluster,” Martin responded.<\/p>\n
Later, Martin defended Mayor Zohran Mamdani to reporters, noting they had attended two news conferences together.<\/p>\n
“The mayor was absolutely present during this cluster, to suggest otherwise is unfair,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Council introduced a package of bills aimed at preventing a future outbreak and establishing more public outreach. One bill would require building owners to clean cooling towers at least three times a year; health officials opposed that bill.<\/p>\n
Martin detailed five efforts the city plans to undertake, like finding unregistered cooling towers and ways to speed up testing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"City health officials are still waiting to identify the site of the Upper East Side Legionnaires’ outbreak. At…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[109,25,13408,9,24,55,54,12,56,87,27,200],"class_list":["post-336569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-top-stories","tag-dan-rivoli","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-politics","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}