Nearly $500,000 went down the drain after a costly NYCHA’s water-testing mishap in September 2022 at Jacob Riis Houses.
Amsterdam News has been reporting the news of the day from a Black perspective for 113 years. Donors who choose to give monthly or annually will receive Amsterdam News’ Weekly E-Edition and acclaimed weekday newsletter Editorially Black to their inbox!Mayor Eric Adams stops by NYCHA’s Jacob Riis Houses in Manhattan and drinks the water to show there are no issues. Tuesday, May 7, 2024. Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
In reality, a broken house pump caused the tenants’ discolored-water complaints. But the false positive turned a routine repair into a multi-day crisis of “unquantifiable stress” for public housing residents informed that they likely ingested the toxic metal. NYCHA rescue plan architectthat a “series of missteps” and “instances of mismanagement” led to the blunder beyond just the false positive.
According to the DOI, the Riis Houses were operating without a superintendent or assistant superintendent during a portion of that summer. A new super was promoted on July 25, 2022. He previously serviced the Lower East Side Houses, a development without a water tank. When he moved to the Riis Houses, he did not receive relevant training on the new system according to the report.
Basically, Strauber said, the wrong tool was used for the job. In a “good faith” attempt to address the resident complaints immediately, NYCHA scrambled to enlist a vendor without the specific contaminant expertise to perform the needed tests on Aug. 12, 2022. The buck was then passed to a subcontracted lab that was not state-certified to perform the broad-spectrum water testing for arsenic and other contaminants, unbeknownst to NYCHA at the time.
NYCHA received the pair of erroneous testing results on Aug. 29 and Sept. 1 and informed both residents and officials. Subsequent water-sample tests soon disproved the findings and the lab then retracted its results. By Sept. 10, NYCHA informed residents they could safely drink the development’s water.
“We did find that NYCHA acted in good faith and we say that in our report: there certainly was a lab error that caused false positive results,” she said. “But that’s not everything that the report concludes. We also conclude that there was a series of missteps or instances of mismanagement within NYCHA that resulted ultimately in the the decision to test the water for arsenic in the use of a lab that was not state certified and that did make mistakes.
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