New York City Council enacted a law in 2015 after a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the Bronx. The law requires that every cooling tower in New York City be identified, registered and inspected on a regular basis. The city has admitted recently that it is not sure it has found all cooling towers, three years after the legislation was passed (the city health department uses experts on the street and satellite imagery to find cooling towers). This failure to even identify all cooling towers takes on added significance after one remembers that there have been two recent outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in the Washington Heights area. Even worse is recently released information by the city that of the 1,190 towers around the city that have been identified, more than 20% are behind on their quarterly inspections. In addition, almost 1000 violations were issued of the 1000 towers inspected by the health department in 2016. Of these 1000 violations, 65% were considered critical and nearly 20% were considered a public health hazard. This noncompliance of the law should not be tolerated by the citizens of New York, particularly in light of the two recent outbreaks.
New York City Admits Still Does Not Know Where All Cooling Towers Are was last modified: October 25th, 2018 by