Council Member Maloney on whether violations could have been caught earlier

Councilmember Maloney.

Thank you, Chair Shulman, and thank you, Commissioner, for your thoughtful testimony.

testimony, your work to contain this outbreak, and your commitment to doing better next time.

I want to echo some of the concerns that have already been raised, including enforcement, transparency, and that includes updating the website to reflect the accuracy of what this outbreak included.

Every life should be counted.

I want to go back to what was raised around enforcement and the violations that increased after in the summer months.

Were the violations that were uncovered during this outbreak response things that the department believes could or should have been identified earlier through the routine inspections that are already in place?

And if so, what needs to change about our routine inspections so that we find these problems before there is an outbreak?

Yeah.

Let me speak to the violations and give some detail there and then turn it over to Deputy Commissioner and talk a little bit more.

So 110 violations were identified as part of this in that cluster region.

This stratified into different sort of types of violations.

15 of them were public health hazards, 50 of them were critical violations, and then another 40 were general violations found in this cluster region.

So let me turn it over to Deputy Commissioner Crenshaw.

Thank you, Commissioner.

And the inspections that we do, it's part of our cluster responses because we're also trying to understand what has happened during a cluster.

But I want to just note that the inspections, which as we've talked about, is one piece of our overall enforcement program, which includes that outreach, education, training.

Those are designed to be an annual inspection.

So it's really a point-in-time check to promote compliance along with all of the other things that we do.

And it's really...

The constant monitoring and maintenance that the owners have to do,

that is the prevention that we need to reduce the risk of Legionella bacteria growing in these systems, which are an ideal environment for the growth of Legionella bacteria.

So in these cases where issues were uncovered, why weren't they discovered earlier through these inspections that you were talking about, and what can we do in the future to find those problems?

We aim to conduct an annual inspection, and when we conduct that inspection, if we find violations, we will issue a summons.

All of that is designed to provide, we have multiple points in our overall program to

encourage cooling tower operators to follow the very detailed requirements in the laws and regulations.

And I quickly wanted to speak about the frequency of the requirements and particularly in the summer when we know cooling systems are heavy.