Chair Schulman on DOB coordination during outbreaks
Schulman asks about the Department of Buildings' role during outbreaks. Martin describes learning from the 2025 unregistered cooling tower discovery and working with DOB over 5-6 months to formalize cross-referencing of registration data, now announced as a new measure.
What is the Department of Buildings'role during an outbreak, and how does DOHMH coordinate with DOB to ensure buildings are complying with orders and requirements?
So as you know from last year, Chair, we found an unregistered cooling tower that at the time was operated by a private company that was at the source of that cluster.
Subsequent to that, we learned from that experience, we understood that identifying these unregistered cooling towers is a priority, and we put that into practice immediately.
We've been working with Department of Buildings over the course of the last five to six months to really build out this process, and we're happy to
point to this new measure that we announced yesterday, which will formalize that and make it automatic, the fact that our systems talk to each other and allow us to share that information back and forth to potentially catch unregistered cooling towers.
Okay, I'm going to, I have a lot more questions, but I'm going to let my colleagues ask and come back around.