Since the revelation over Labor Day weekend, city officials have set up water faucets and a water dispenser in a parking lot, but have offered tenants few other details about the evolving situation. “We’re going to have our answers,” Tenant Association President Daphne Williams said as she sat under a tent Tuesday afternoon handing out meals to residents. “This won’t just go away.” Charles Lutwak, a spokesman for the mayor said Tuesday night that they have retested the original sites where arsenic was detected and now it has come back negative. In addition, they are testing 140 more locations, and so far 58 of those tests have found safe drinking water, although they are still recommending that residents drink bottled water while they wait for the rest of the results. Mayor Eric Adams addressed the ongoing issue at an unrelated news conference Tuesday afternoon. “We will be extremely transparent,” the mayor told The City and other reporters. “We’re going to do a detailed report on what we’re doing to make sure people are safe.” Williams said many Jacob Rees residents had voted for Adams and expected more from him in their time of need. He said he recently turned to nonprofits to help residents rather than city agencies and wondered if tenants would be offered some kind of rent discount for their hardship. “This disrupts our entire routine of life. We’re out here sitting here in the rain,” he said. “We could be at home in our own warm apartments, but we can’t go up and drink our water like the mayor can drink his, in a nice warm place.” On Saturday, NYCHA federal supervisor Bart Schwartz, who monitors conditions in public housing following a 2018 consent decree with the federal government, ordered the city to withhold documents related to water testing at Jacob Riis. The city initially said NYCHA managers knew about unsafe levels of arsenic for two weeks. Later reports from the publication described how NYCHA hired contractor LiquiTech on August 30 and the company had collected six water samples from two buildings in the Riis complex. A day later, the company had found that five out of six of those water samples contained arsenic levels above safe levels, The City reported. Mayor Charles Lutwak’s spokesman told Gothamist over the weekend that “preliminary results … from retesting” on Friday identified the male for the first time, disputing reports that city officials had been aware of for the past few days. Lutvak did not return a request for additional comment on the timing of when arsenic was detected to how high the arsenic level was when it was previously detected. State Assemblyman Harvey Epstein called at a public meeting for residents to hear directly from NYCHA and city officials. Several tenants who spoke to Gothamist described feeling sick in recent weeks but weren’t sure how to get tested for arsenic poisoning, which can cause everything from vomiting, nausea and diarrhea to paralysis and blindness, according to the EPA . The city’s Health Department did not immediately return a request for comment on whether they would help residents get tested if they suspected arsenic poisoning. Martha Lozano, 69, said her daughter, who has developmental disabilities, had been sick for several days. He wanted to test her, but her primary care doctor didn’t do the right test. He went to an urgent care that didn’t even have the test. “If I go to the emergency room, they’ll tell me the same thing. I’m just scared because she doesn’t know any better,” she said, describing how her daughter often drinks from the tap when she’s not watching. “I’m happy to live here. I have a nice apartment. But they have to tell us the truth about water.”
