Cascade of NYCHA Failures Led to Panic Over Nonexistent Arsenic, Probe Finds

A series of bureaucratic blunders triggered the 2022 debacle over the ultimately debunked tests that claimed arsenic was in the water at the Jacob Riis Houses and resulted in nearly $500,000 in “unnecessary costs” to taxpayers, according to twin investigations by the New York City Housing Authority’s federal monitor and the city Department of Investigation.

It started with a low-level NYCHA manager’s failure to pay a vendor on time for fixing a water pump and progressed to a poorly coordinated effort by top management to order up tests for potential contaminants at Riis after tenants had been complaining for weeks about cloudy water coming out of their taps.

In a 51-page report released Thursday, DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber described an “inadequate ad hoc response” to the crisis and made 23 recommendations to tighten up NYCHA’s follow-up to tenant complaints about potentially contaminated drinking water.

“The report says pretty clearly in this instance there were a cascade of missteps,” Strauber told THE CITY. “Contaminated water concerns can’t be addressed in an ad hoc way. NYCHA does test water tanks. They didn’t have any procedures for what happens if there’s a water concern that happens in an unplanned way.”

As a result, Strauber noted, Riis’ 4,000 tenants suffered.

“There was a significant amount of anxiety and concern as anyone would have if they were told there was a dangerous element in their water supply,” she said. “It creates a lack of trust and concern about how these developments are being managed.”

The joint investigation found that NYCHA did not consult with city health and environmental agencies to determine what to test for, did not instruct the vendor what to test for, did not get a second opinion from another vendor to double-check the first vendor’s results, and slowed the whole process down by not requesting a 24-hour turnaround. As a result, it took 16 days from the time the first test turned up purported arsenic at Riis to the day the mayor and NYCHA tenants were notified.

DOI’s report stated that “while NYCHA’s efforts were undertaken in good faith to promptly address the perceived public health issue, NYCHA’s inability to properly determine the cause of the water problems, exacerbated by the erroneous test results, caused unquantifiable stress for residents at the Jacob Riis Houses and cost NYCHA nearly $500,000 in unnecessary costs.”

All told, DOI estimates NYCHA spent an extra $482,506 on the arsenic debacle of 2022, including money spent on bottled water distributed to residents along with $336,000 on overtime and multiple $200 payments to Riis residents to help them buy bottled water.

Mayor on the Scene

The issue of arsenic in the water at Riis has been contentious since the eve of the Labor Day weekend in 2022, when initial testing by a NYCHA vendor reported elevated levels of arsenic in the tap water of some buildings within the sprawling 4,000-tenant development that sits on what was once a 19th-century manufactured gas plant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Mayor Eric Adams rushed to the scene and helped distribute bottled water. For a week, NYCHA instructed tenants not to drink the water or take showers — until the testing company it hired suddenly reversed course and said its initial results were erroneous. The predictable uproar triggered multiple investigations about what led up to the costly confusion.

Since then, NYCHA has consistently insisted that Riis residents should not be concerned about the quality of their water, citing months of repeated tests of roof tanks, water’s main points of entry, and a representative sample of apartments by NYCHA from August through December 2022. The city Department of Environmental Protection has separately performed multiple tests of water mains at Riis through last month.

All the testing has consistently backed up NYCHA’s insistence that unacceptable levels of arsenic have never been detected at Riis.

“There is not and never was arsenic in the water there,” NYCHA Chairperson Lisa Bova-Hiatt declared at a recent City Council hearing after Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn) referenced a recent report in Politico about a Riis tenant who says she’d registered high levels of arsenic in her blood. In January 2023, THE CITY reported on another Riis resident with elevated arsenic levels who later died.

Immediately after the Adams administration declared the false-positive arsenic test results were null and void on Sept. 9, 2022, Bart Schwartz, at the time NYCHA’s outside monitor, teamed up with DOI to look into the events that led up to that chaotic moment.

DOI and the monitor’s investigators interviewed NYCHA staff at Riis as well as in the authority’s central office, and they examined internal emails and vendor records. Both the monitor and DOI ultimately placed blame for the fumbled handling of the crisis on several levels of NYCHA management, starting with the staff at Riis.

Investigators found that starting in June 2022, NYCHA began receiving regular tenant complaints about cloudy and sometimes brownish water coming out of the taps in apartments in the 13-building complex.

As with other Manhattan residences, the tap water at Riis originates in upstate reservoirs that are monitored regularly by city environmental inspectors. It’s channeled into the buildings there via the city’s water main system, and in the case of Riis’ high-rise buildings is pumped up into two rooftop water tanks that NYCHA is supposed to inspect on a regular basis. NYCHA heating plant technicians are also “responsible for regular and documented inspections of all house pumps” that get the water to the roof tanks, the monitor’s report states.

As the number of tenant complaints increased, a new superintendent began working at Riis on July 25, 2022. The super’s prior job was at the Lower East Side Houses, which didn’t have water tanks. The freshman super did not receive training on proper maintenance of water tanks and water distribution systems, DOI noted.

The new superintendent began assigning “dirty or brown water work order tickets to his maintenance workers,” but the workers repeatedly reported back that the problems were “unfounded” or “previously corrected.”

Both reports date the beginning of the crisis to July 28, when a Riis maintenance worker stumbled upon the fact that one of two water pumps in Building 11 was broken. The pumps served seven buildings at Riis. The worker also discovered that a hatch door to the roof tank that was supposed to be locked was open. For a time, NYCHA employees believed that this was the cause of the discolored water, the DOI report states.

How long this condition had existed is unknown because, as the monitor and DOI determined, an alarm that’s supposed to go off when a pump goes out of service was not turned on.

The day the worker discovered the busted pump, the worker asked a vendor at the site inspecting roof exhaust fans to look at it. The vendor removed the pump to repair it and the worker began the byzantine process of getting NYCHA superiors to approve payment so a repaired pump could be reinstalled.

But the worker’s supervisor put the request in as a roof exhaust fan repair, so the payment was not sent out. More than a week later, on Aug. 8, the vendor inquired about payment. The supervisor who submitted the erroneous request realized the error and resubmitted it for a pump repair. Not until Aug. 10 was the payment approved and the repaired pump reinstalled.

That meant that mid-level NYCHA staff were aware of the broken pump as NYCHA didn’t get around to paying to have it fixed for 13 days, during which time Riis tenants continued to flood the NYCHA call center with complaints about cloudy water.

Since the pump was out for an unknown time period before that, many of the development’s buildings were relying on just one pump instead of two, the federal monitor found.

“With only one house pump operating, excessive air entered the water pipes fed by the tank on Building 11, and caused the water tank level to decrease as water was consumed by residents but not appropriately restored by the overtaxed remaining House pump,” the monitor’s report states.

“Excessive aeration leads to a cloudy appearance of water,” the monitor noted.

Tested ‘Everything’

NYCHA, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what was causing the complaints. The ensuing activity to figure that out unfolded in slow motion.

On Aug. 12 the rookie Riis superintendent provided a chronology to NYCHA Chief Operating Officer Eva Trimble but did not mention the broken water pump. Trimble then got an underling to try and reach out to American Pipe, a vendor NYCHA had relied on for years to test water tanks. It was a Friday evening and no one responded. The underling then contacted another NYCHA vendor, Liquitech, which also tests water tanks for Legionella, to test the water at Riis.

Trimble did not request expedited results, which would have produced test results within 24 hours, and, the monitor noted, no one at NYCHA instructed Liquitech what to test for.

Top NYCHA staff including Trimble “should have supervised the testing process more closely, including at a minimum, clarifying the testing parameters and ensuring that the water was tested as they intended,” the DOI report stated.

Further, the monitor noted, “There is no evidence that anyone at NYCHA had yet consulted with a water quality or public health expert as to what kind of specific testing would be necessary and appropriately tailored based on the characteristics of the water that had been observed and reported.”

Instead NYCHA generally conveyed to Liquitech “the water should be tested for ‘everything’,” the monitor noted.

Liquitech took a single sample and sent it to an Illinois-based lab, Environmental Monitoring and Technology (EMT), which on Aug. 18 registered a positive reading for an elevated level of arsenic in Riis’ water — the first time any toxin was identified in test results.

But EMT didn’t tell Liquitech about that result for another eight days, and Liquitech didn’t tell NYCHA about it until Aug. 29 — 11 days after the initial lab results got a positive hit.

At that point, NYCHA chose not to notify tenants or the public.

NYCHA could have asked a separate vendor to double-check the initial result showing arsenic, but instead chose to stick with Liquitech, which on Aug. 30 took samples from six apartments in two Riis buildings. All came back the next day as positive for elevated levels of arsenic, but Liquitech didn’t tell NYCHA managers that until Sept. 1. NYCHA didn’t notify City Hall until the next day, Sept. 2, the Friday before Labor Day weekend.

That evening, THE CITY began inquiring about the findings, and soon after Adams showed up at Riis to distribute bottles of water and announce the new “don’t-drink-the-water” warning.

The DOI report also disclosed that the same day NYCHA got preliminary results from Liquitech, samples collected two weeks earlier showed potential presence of Legionella bacteria in three kitchen sinks. But it wasn’t until two days later that the NYCHA employee who got the Legionella results informed executive staff about them, and after city environmental officials questioned the integrity of that test, NYCHA at the time did not disclose the results to tenants and the public.

On Sept. 4, two days after tenants were told not to drink the water, NYCHA for the first time brought in another consultant, the LiRo Group, which collected samples at 95 apartments, Riis’ water tanks and the water main point of entry to one of the buildings where EMT’s testing had registered arsenic. The next day LiRo reported that results from 86 samples were “non-detectable for arsenic.”

After more LiRo testing turned up no arsenic and Liquitech turned over its full results registering Legionella, Mayor Eric Adams issued a Sept. 7 press release revealing the Legionella results for the first time, and noting the LiRo testing continued to register zero arsenic.

Two days later the mayor and NYCHA announced the EMT lab results were bogus. The monitor and DOI both point out that EMT was not licensed to perform this type of testing in New York State (although the firm is licensed in other states). The next day NYCHA told tenants it was safe to drink the water and take showers again.

In response to this chaotic mess, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law legislation “to ensure affected residents receive prompt written notice when they should avoid use of water” at their developments.

Change Demanded

Subsequent to the anxiety-inducing events of August and September 2022, NYCHA created an office of water quality and hired contractors with “appropriate specialized expertise and the necessary qualifications,” DOI stated.

After all of this, DOI made 23 recommendations in the report made public Thursday, of which NYCHA accepted most. That includes providing increased training to development-level staff and requiring that supervisors should specifically keep an eye out for an accumulation of cloudy water complaints.

The authority leadership also agreed to develop a specific protocol delineating when NYCHA executives should be notified of water issues, including tenant complaints “relating to the appearance or condition of the water.”

NYCHA did not accept all of DOI’s recommendations. DOI, for example, noted that some development water pumps are supposed to be inspected by highly qualified heating management systems department employees, while other NYCHA inspectors “are less likely to have detailed understanding of the system.”

It recommended that heating management staff inspect all water pumps daily, but NYCHA shot this down, instead asserting that the authority is rolling out a new system where various employees, from development superintendents to plumbers and electricians, handle the task on a rotating basis.

On the issue of the water pump alarm that was turned off, DOI suggested NYCHA adopt a Bluetooth system to alert NYCHA staff when an alarm activates. NYCHA accepted this, with a caveat — it’s expensive, and they’ll need more funding to get it done.

In its conclusion, DOI was optimistic.

“Following the implementation of the policy and procedural recommendations made by DOI and the former federal monitor, NYCHA is in a stronger position to handle a potential or actual water contaminant in the future,” the report stated.

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