What to Know
- Residents at NYCHA's Jacob Riis Houses, one of the city's largest public housing developments, are still being told to not use water from the tap
- A shocking Friday revelation from the city suggests the lab gave false results, and the water tests at the NYCHA housing complex never had arsenic in it
- City officials are waiting on additional testing by a second vendor before giving the all-clear
Residents at NYCHA's Jacob Riis Houses are still being told to use bottled water to bathe, cook and drink despite the city saying the lab responsible for detecting arsenic has issued a retraction after providing "false results," prompting a water crisis for tenants the past seven days.
The water sampled at the Manhattan NYCHA housing complex never contained arsenic, city officials said. Environmental Monitoring and Technologies, the lab behind last week's test, reportedly admitted to delivering inaccurate results after introducing arsenic to the samples collected from the buildings.
"We have now tested more than 140 points — both at the source and at the point of delivery — and we can confidently say the water at Riis Houses is and has been free of any discernable amount of arsenic since the initial tests were initiated in August," the mayor's press secretary, Fabien Levy, said Friday.
The original samples linked to the positive test result were retested at the same lab this week and came back negative for arsenic, Levy said. That result matches the work of a second vendor the city contracted out to after the first positive result in, he said.
City leaders plan to explore all legal avenues while guaranteeing the end to all work with Environmental Monitoring and Technologies.
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Despite the end-of-day revelation, the city is still asking NYCHA residents at the complex to continue to avoid using the water as additional test results come in. Another round of tests for additional contaminants and completed by LiRo Environmental, the second vendor used by the city, is expected to return more answers on Saturday.
"In the meantime, out of an abundance of caution, we are continuing to ask Riis Houses residents not to drink or cook with the water in their buildings until these final test results are returned and analyzed. We continue to provide clean water for anyone who needs it," Levy added.
Prior to the city's announcement that the water at the Jacob Riis Houses did not in fact contain arsenic, some residents said they knew something was wrong with the water even before this week's trouble.
"For a while, the water has been coming out brown," Martha Charles, a resident at the Jacob Riis Houses, said.
As the city continues to wait for the newest round of test results, a federal monitor is asking the city to keep all the documents and testing related to the dangerous levels of arsenic discovered in the water at the Jacob Riis Houses for further investigation.
