The Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that had the Upper East Side checking rooftops all month has stopped spreading, the city announced Friday. Investigators still can’t say which cooling tower caused it, and the system that drew more violations than any other is one the city didn’t know existed until this month.
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The Health Department said the incubation window for new cases has closed and there’s no longer an elevated risk of exposure in ZIP codes 10028, 10075 and 10128, the stretch of Carnegie Hill and Yorkville where the cluster was concentrated. The last person connected to the cluster started feeling symptoms two weeks ago, and Legionnaires’ takes two to 14 days to surface after exposure. More than 90% of patients got sick before July 7, five days into the city’s response.The toll as of July 30: 92 cases, 79 hospitalizations, five people still in the hospital, and seven deaths. That seventh death was confirmed this week, according to NBC New York, and it puts this cluster even with last summer’s Harlem outbreak, the one that prompted the City Council to require monthly cooling tower testing in the first place.
Inspectors have now finished all 82 cooling towers under the department’s jurisdiction that tested positive on either the initial PCR screen or the follow-up culture test. Sixty percent of those inspections turned up at least one violation, more than 110 in total, including over 15 classified as public health hazards.
The worst of them sits at 300 E. 83rd St., where the cooling tower had never been registered with the city at all. Investigators found it by cross-checking Department of Buildings permit records against the city’s registration database and then going out to look. The owners hadn’t developed a required maintenance plan, hadn’t documented water treatment, and hadn’t sampled for Legionella in more than a year. The Health Department cited 11 violations and has issued $11,000 in fines so far. Whether that tower sickened anyone is a separate question, and a murkier one. It came back negative on the city’s initial PCR screen, and NBC New York reported this week that it tested negative for the bacteria. But the Health Department has not published a final culture result for it, and the city’s own tally shows at least four towers in this investigation that screened PCR negative and still grew live Legionella in the lab.
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Second on the list is 1520 York Ave., at the corner of E. 80th St., with nine violations and $9,000 in fines, including a failure to do the newly required monthly sampling. The operator responsible for that tower told NBC New York it had only recently taken over the system.Where the outbreak actually started is still an open question. The city’s Public Health Laboratory is comparing bacterial samples taken from patients against samples pulled from the towers that came back positive for live Legionella, and those genome sequencing results aren’t expected until the end of August.
That timeline matters well beyond the epidemiology. At least two people sickened in the cluster have retained an attorney, Crain’s reported earlier this month. Separately, the widow of one of the men who died has signaled she intends to sue. Robert Goldstein, an 88-year-old Air Force veteran, spent two weeks in intensive care before he died in mid-July, weeks short of his 50th wedding anniversary. His building tested negative for Legionella, and the family’s attorney told CBS New York he plans to target the owner of whichever building’s rooftop tower the city ultimately identifies as the source. Until the lab finishes, there’s no defendant to name.
The city is also facing a reckoning from the City Council. Council Speaker Julie Menin, whose district covers Carnegie Hill and Yorkville, has spent the month arguing that the Health Department moved too slowly, waiting on test results instead of proactively disinfecting towers once the epicenter was identified, and leaving residents in the dark about whether their own buildings had tested positive. The City Council will hold an oversight hearing in September to examine the administration’s response, which Menin has since called insufficient. Council members are also weighing legislation to set up a public hotline during peak summer months, and Health Committee Chair Lynn Schulman has said lawmakers will look at requiring building owners to tell tenants whether they have a cooling tower and when it was last cleaned.
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The Health Department’s counterargument is compliance. It published a preliminary list of positive buildings on July 10, a level of transparency it says it had never offered during a community cluster investigation before. The next day, 74% of the towers it later inspected had filed the monthly testing records the law requires. By July 24, that figure was 97%. Across all 183 towers sampled in the neighborhood, compliance climbed from 73% to 92%. Citywide it barely budged, from 77% to 80%.Health Commissioner Dr. Alister F. Martin said the department will continue to “hold accountable any building owner who fails to meet their responsibility.”
For residents, the practical guidance hasn’t changed. Tap water, showers, cooking, and window air conditioners were never a risk. Legionnaires’ spreads through inhaled mist, not person to person, and it’s treatable with antibiotics. If you developed a cough, fever, or shortness of breath in the past two weeks, it’s worth a call to your doctor, but the city says the window for new exposures tied to this cluster has closed.
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