Attorneys and families of dozens of Legionnaires’ disease victims from last summer’s Harlem outbreak are suing the city and several contractors they allege failed to maintain cooling towers linked with the public health emergency in which seven people died and roughly 120 people were sickened.
City health officials have said the Central Harlem outbreak was the city’s worst outbreak of Legionnaires’ — a form of severe pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria that can spread through contaminated mist from building cooling systems — in nearly a decade. Last month, a separate, since-ended Legionnaires’ outbreak on the Upper East Side caused seven deaths and more than 90 cases.
Three lawsuits were filed Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court on behalf of 41 victims in last year’s outbreak. They seek compensatory and punitive damages and allege negligence, public nuisance and wrongful death.
Speaking at a press conference Thursday alongside Harlem residents who got sick or lost loved ones in last year’s outbreak, civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said the city’s response to the emergency was neglectful, and added that officials have treated outbreaks in other neighborhoods differently.
“You cannot act as though the lives of people and the work of people depends on what part of the town they live in,” Sharpton said at the headquarters of the nonprofit National Action Network, which he founded. “Geography does not have anything to do with violence.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump didn’t specify a dollar amount the lawsuits seek, but said the plaintiffs whose loved ones died are suing for the “full value” of the loss of lives.
“An outbreak of this magnitude does not happen in a vacuum,” Crump said in a statement. “Public health safeguards exist for a reason, and when they are not followed, families, workers, and entire communities bear the consequences.”
Families of victims who died in the outbreak said Harlem and Bellevue hospitals — both city hospitals — were negligent and dismissive when they sought care for their loved ones. The plaintiffs are suing NYC Health and Hospitals, the city and the contractors allegedly involved in the upkeep of the infected cooling towers. They’re also suing Skanska USA Building, a construction company they say was responsible for maintaining cooling towers at the city’s Public Health Laboratory in Harlem, as well as Skanska subcontractors after Crump said genetic tests linked Legionella found at the site to some of the victims.
“Protecting public health and safety is at the center of the city’s response,” a spokesperson for the city Law Department said in a statement. “We will carefully review these cases.”
A representative for Skanska USA Building said it does not comment on pending litigation.
Plaintiff Lakisha Plowden said she lost her fiancé and the father of her 6-year-old daughter Brooke, who also attended the press conference, to Legionnaires’ disease. She said she and all of her daughters are in therapy because of the experience.
“He passed away holding my hand in Harlem Hospital, and they tried to throw it off as pneumonia,” Plowden said of her late fiancé Bruce Scott. “They wouldn’t answer any of my questions when I was there.”
City officials have said they’re investigating the source of the Upper East Side outbreak, for which they tested more than 180 cooling towers and conducted more than 360 tests on the samples to determine which buildings had Legionella. Nearly 60 cooling towers tested positive for the bacteria and officials ordered more than 80 buildings to clean and disinfect their cooling towers.
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