Gothamist78%
NYC scrambled to recruit, onboard new cooling tower inspectors before deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak 47%
By Caroline Lewis37%
7/21/2026, 10:30:50 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 30.3% saturation with 277 hits. Analysis detected 1,441 faulty-reasoning hits from 914 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.2% and a BS Rank of 47% (10,791 of 20,370 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 53.00% of the article peer group.
The New York City health department was still scrambling to hire, onboard and train new water ecologists to help prevent and contain Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks — a stated priority for the department following a deadly outbreak of the disease in Harlem last summer — when a fresh cluster of cases was identified on the Upper East Side earlier this month, according to new staffing figures the agency shared with Gothamist.
Legionnaires’ disease is a severe form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria, which can grow in buildings' water cooling towers, and the water ecologists play key roles in ensuring building owners properly maintain the towers.
The Upper East Side outbreak has sickened more than 70 people and killed four since it was first identified on July 2, according to city data.
In addition to responding to outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease like the one on the Upper East Side, the city’s water ecologists are responsible for conducting regular inspections of cooling towers year-round and ensuring that building owners have adequate maintenance plans in place to prevent the growth of Legionella, as required by city law.
But the city currently has only 35 water ecologists and supervisors on staff, up from 30 last October, according to Chantal Gomez, a health department spokesperson.
Another 14 are currently in the process of being onboarded and the city is recruiting to fill seven remaining vacancies, Gomez said.
The health department is currently budgeted for 56 water ecologist positions, 23 of which were approved in November, Gomez said.
She added that after water ecologists are hired, they must train for several months, shadowing experienced staffers in the field before they can work independently.
Gomez did not specify how many of the city’s water ecologists are still in training.
A union rep for the water ecologists said the city’s efforts to staff up have been slowed by bureaucratic hurdles at the health department and the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, as well as inadequate pay for the amount of experience required.
“ We have known since last summer that this was going to be an issue again,” said Meghan Peterson, president of Local 3005, a chapter of the municipal union DC 37, which represents the workers.
Water ecologists and other city health department workers represented by DC 37 are in the process of negotiating a new contract.
Peterson said more flexible schedules and the option for more remote work, along with higher pay, would help make the position more attractive.
“These positions are paid low wages,” Peterson said.
“They work outside on rooftops where they encounter physical hazards like heights, exposed wires.”
A city health department ad for a water ecologist position posted on July 15 places the salary range between $52,804 and $60,725.
Gomez did not respond to a request for comment on whether hiring has been held up by OMB, which declined to comment.
The city health department touted its hiring efforts in an announcement ahead of the Upper East Side outbreak in May.
At the time, the city health department said it was in the process of onboarding the 23 new staffers who had been approved.
Even as the health department worked to staff up, Gomez said the agency was still able to quickly deploy water ecology staff to help contain the outbreak on the Upper East Side.
“The NYC Health Department is responding rapidly and aggressively to stop the spread of Legionnaires’ disease on the Upper East Side,” Gomez said.
“Our team of environmental scientists are essential to that response, working nonstop since the investigation was launched to sample more than 180 cooling towers.”
When the outbreak was identified on July 2, the city began pulling water ecologists off holiday vacations to test cooling towers in the affected ZIP codes for Legionella, according to Dr.
Alister Martin, the city health commissioner.
That process has since resulted in 76 cooling towers testing positive for the bacteria.
City health officials said all the towers that tested positive have now been cleaned and disinfected by the building owners and that new cases are starting to peter out as a result of the remediation effort.
City health officials are still working to determine which tower actually caused the outbreak, which Martin said will require additional testing.
The city’s water ecologists also play a key role in preventing outbreaks by ensuring maintenance plans are being followed.
But Gothamist found last year that cooling tower inspections by city employees dropped significantly in the years leading up to the Harlem outbreak — a decline city officials attributed to a staffing shortage.
Gothamist also found that the city-run Harlem Hospital, one of the sites whose cooling towers caused that outbreak, failed to follow its own maintenance plan.
That outbreak helped spark a call for increased staffing.
At the start of the Harlem outbreak, there were just 24 water ecologists on staff, but the health department quickly hired six more by October.
Since then, Gomez said hiring efforts have continued.
“In the first six months of this year, we completed 1,582 cooling tower inspections, a 35% increase compared to the same period last year,” Gomez said Monday.
According to a Gothamist analysis, many cooling towers are still going uninspected by the city.
As of late June of this year, city employees had inspected 1,306 of the nearly 6,000 cooling towers citywide since the start of 2026, Gothamist found.
<i>Joe Hong contributed reporting.</i>
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