At a New York City Council hearing on Wednesday, municipal agency heads were grilled about what they knew and when they acted during the wildfire smoke crisis that swept the metro area in early June.
The tense hearing stretched for nearly four hours on a day when the city faced yet another air quality alert — this time for ground-level ozone, an urban pollutant worsened by hot, stagnant weather. Most of the Council’s questions were directed toward Zachary Iscol, the commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
Iscol praised the city government’s response. He added that Notify NYC is the city’s primary means of sending emergency alerts, and that it communicates in 14 languages and regularly sends alerts when the air quality index tracked by the state Department of Environmental Conservation reaches orange (100 or higher). State environmental officials feed these alerts to the mayor’s office and local branches of the National Weather Service.
Councilmember Lynn Schulman, who represents parts of Queens and chairs the health committee, received the alerts in early June. She responded that she didn’t know what to do with the information, and added that the warnings didn’t come with any details.
The mayor’s press office contacted Gothamist prior to Wednesday’s hearing to state that the administration’s “public messaging around potentially bad air quality began a week before the worst of the smoke.”
But these air quality alerts — for June 1 and June 2 — were due to elevated ozone levels, not smoke. City officials referenced the same ozone alerts as evidence for their messaging on the smoke crisis during Wednesday’s Council hearing.
For many answers, Iscol deferred to other city agencies or offered to follow up after the public hearing. Among the missing details were the extent and sources of outreach to inform the public — especially vulnerable communities such as homeless New Yorkers — about the unhealthy air.
Members of the…
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