Mayor Mamdani announces new measures to strengthen city’s response to legionnaire disease
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Health Department are rolling out five new measures to strengthen the city’s response to legionnaire disease.
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The deadly outbreak of the legionnaire disease in the Upper East Side has resulted in 94 cases and 11 deaths.
As a result of the spread, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Health Department announced a series of new measures on Tuesday, that aim to strengthen the City’s education, enforce compliance of safety measures and make for quicker response time.
The new measures include:
Identifying potentially unregistered cooling towers by developing synergy between the Health Department and the NYC Department of Buildings in the City’s registration and tracking systems.
Enhancing public visibility and transparency regarding cooling tower regulations by adding a mapping feature to the Health Department’s address-based cooling tower lookup tool.
Exploring faster culture testing methods and novel testing approaches to decrease the amount of time it takes to test and confirm positive results.
Accelerating enforcement of cooling tower violations by assigning the earliest Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) date that rules permit.
Convening a scientific advisory panel to evaluate emerging cooling tower technology and alternative cooling systems.
The measures will start to roll out as early as the end of this year and continue into 2028.
“New York City responded to this summer’s cluster of Legionnaires’ disease with urgency and an unprecedented level of action. When New Yorkers’ health is at stake, government cannot wait for the crisis to pass before asking how it can do better. Our response to the Upper East Side cluster was fast and aggressive, and we are building on what we learned to make our systems stronger, enforcement faster and public health response more transparent,” said Mayor Mamdani. “New Yorkers deserve a government that moves with urgency to keep them safe.”
The disease impacted residents at the Parkchester North Condominiums in Parkchester in 2025, the health department confirmed four reported cases between July and August.
On Tuesday, neighbors told News 12 they wish the resources would come sooner.
"It could be a little faster. But I know they have to do the studies," said one neighbor, Katherine.
Others questioned if the city had enough resources for an effective rollout. "Does the city have the resources to fund that and pay for that? Or even the people to go out and do that? Probably not," said one neighbor, Nircelle.
Despite New Yorkers having to wait some time before the plans go into effect, the city says as of August, 81% of cooling towers citywide are following monthly requirements for testing and sampling.
Meanwhile, since May, out of 800 field inspections, over 467 have resulted in at least one violation and left the city to collect $80,500 in fines.
