Harlem residents accuse NYC of shirking life-saving inspections amid deadly Legionnaires disease outbreak: Irresponsible

The deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak gripping Harlem has city officials in hot water — as locals accused them Friday of dropping the ball on life-saving inspections and needlessly slow-walking revealing exactly where the disease hit.Many outraged Harlem residents told The Post they only learned that they lived or worked in one of 10 buildings with cooling towers that tested positive for the insidious Legionnaires’-causing bacterium after the list was unveiled Thursday — weeks into the outbreak that has killed four people.“Why weren’t these cooling towers properly maintained? Who dropped the ball and why?” raged Nichole Ingram, who fell ill with Legionnaires’ disease around July 24 after she attended a funeral service in 2239 Adam Clayton Powell Jr.Blvd, one of the affected buildings.Ingram, 53, said her son Raymond, an asthmatic 35-year-old, was still hospitalized with the flu-like, respiratory illness in New York-Presbyterian Hospital after a stay in Harlem Hospital — one of several city-owned buildings with affected cooling towers.“Why buildings in Harlem and not in lower Manhattan? People are losing their lives unnecessarily,” she said.The outbreak comes amid a drop in cooling tower inspections.

Only roughly 1,200 cooling towers were inspected for Legionnaires’ bacteria during the first six months of this year, compared to nearly 5,100 at the same point in 2017, data provided by the city Department of Health shows.Building owners by law are required to test for the disease-causing bacteria Legionella every 90 days to avoid outbreaks.Four New Yorkers have died in the current outbreak and 17 remain hospitalized out of 99 confirmed cases, DOH officials said Thursday.Officials that day also finally released — after weeks of only providing five ZIP codes — the addresses of the buildings with the 12 total cooling towers that tested positive for Legionella.All but one of the 10 buildings were either behind on the mandated testing or had cooling...