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34 Dead, and Nobody Knew Why: The Hotel on Broad Street · NOXTalks

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Knox Talks, the podcast exploring the groundbreaking ways technology shapes our built environment.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: On the 27th of July 1976, a 61-year-old retired Air Force officer named Ray Brennan died at home in Pennsylvania of what looked like a heart attack.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Three days earlier, he'd been at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Within a week, 11 more men from that convention were dead, and nobody could say why.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Today, we're diving into the hotel on Broad Street, a Halloween special about the building everyone blamed and the question nobody ever closed.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Find every episode at sevennox.com slash KnoxTalks.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Opened in 1904, Marble and Chandeliers, a bit faded by then.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: That week it hosted the Pennsylvania American Legion's annual convention.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Around 4,000 veterans and their families, in a building that was, unusually for its age, fully air conditioned.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: The convention wrapped up on the 24th.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone went home.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then, a few days later, they started getting sick.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Fever, chest pain, a cough that wouldn't lift.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: By the 2nd of August, 12 were dead.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: By the 6th, 25 were dead, and more than 100 were in hospital.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: A doctor in Bloomsburg noticed that three of his patients had all been at the same convention.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really how the pattern got spotted.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Not by the hotel, not by the city, by a small town physician joining DOTS.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: The CDC sent 20 investigators, the largest deployment in its history up to that point.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: They interviewed hundreds of attendees, and the picture that came back was strange.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: The illness didn't spread person to person.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wives who'd nursed sick husbands didn't catch it.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Nurses didn't catch it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: But some of the people who got sick had never checked in at all.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: They'd been within a block of the hotel and said they'd never gone inside.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: The investigators gave those cases their own name, Broad Street Pneumonia.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: So whatever this thing was, it was in the air.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Outside the building as much as inside it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now here's where it gets properly unsettling.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: The theories ran wild.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Nickel poisoning, Freon leaking from the air conditioning, sabotage.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Science magazine ran a piece calling it a postmortem on an investigation that failed.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Congress held hearings, and for five months the lab samples kept coming back clean.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then, over the Christmas break, a CDC microbiologist named Joseph McDade, who'd been told at a party that the experts had let everyone down, went back to his slides.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: He re-ran a test without one of the chemicals he'd used before, looked down the microscope, and saw a field of bacteria nobody had catalogued.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: On the 18th of January, 1977, the CDC announced that a previously unknown bacterium was responsible.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: It would get its name two years later, Legionella pneumophila.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: The final count was 221 people sick and 34 dead.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the source?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the uncomfortable part.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was never conclusively found.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: The original outbreak report says so in as many words.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: The explanation that emerged later, and the one most people tell now, is the cooling tower on the hotel roof.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Warm water, a bit of scale, a bit of biofilm, a fine spray, and drift carrying into the fresh air intake or down onto the street.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: It fits the evidence, but nobody ever recovered the outbreak strain from a tower or a water system.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the leading explanation, not a proven one.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in fairness, nobody could have thought of a cooling tower as a hazard.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: The organism hadn't been discovered yet.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: One more detail, if you'd like to lose some sleep.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: When researchers went back through old records, they found that two people had died after an Oddfellows convention at the same hotel in 1974, later linked to the same organism.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: The building had done it before.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: The Bellevue Stratford never recovered from the publicity.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: In November 76, after 72 years, it closed.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: It reopened in 79 as the Fairmont after a$25 million renovation, got its old name back a year later, and it's still there today as a Hyatt.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's just never shaken the story.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that's the ghost story.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the part that should bother you more than the ghost story.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: It never stopped.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: In 2015, the South Bronx recorded 138 cases and 16 deaths, the largest Legionnaires outbreak in New York City's history.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Investigators tested 183 cooling towers, and this time they had a tool nobody had in 76, genome sequencing.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: The strain in the patients matched the tower on the roof of the Opera House Hotel and no other.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: A hotel, a cooling tower, missed.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: 39 years later, the same pathway, and this time the link held.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: New York answered with local law 77, every cooling tower registered with a maintenance program on file, and it hasn't stopped tightening.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: In August last year, a cluster in central Harlem put 92 people in hospital and killed seven.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: Since May this year, every operating cooling tower in the city has to be tested for Legionella every 31 days, not every 90.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ashray had published Standard 188 back in 2015, the minimum requirements for managing Legionella risk in building water systems, cooling towers included.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's legally binding depends on where you are, but it's the benchmark everyone measures against.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: The current edition is 188-2021, with Guideline 12 as the practical companion.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the CDC's own numbers say this is a maintenance disease.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: When they reviewed 27 outbreaks from 2000 to 2014, 23 of them, 85%, had maintenance gaps a better water management program could have addressed.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Reported cases nearly quadrupled over the same period, and about 1 in 10 people who catch it die.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Cooling towers weren't even the biggest culprit either.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Potable water, the hot and cold water inside the building, came up more than twice as often.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So this isn't a cooling tower disease, it's a building water disease.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, three things to do this quarter if there's a cooling tower on your roof.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: First, find out whether you have a written water management program under ASHRAY 188 and who actually owns it.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: If the answer is the contractor does something, that isn't a program.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Second, pull the last 12 months of tower treatment logs and biocide dosing records and check that the dates are real and the readings actually move with weather and load.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: A log that's too tidy is as worrying as one that's blank.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Third, walk the roof and look at where the drift goes when the wind blows.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: If it can reach an air intake, an open window, or the footpath, that tower needs more than a quarterly visit.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Bellevue Stratford didn't have a villain.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: It had a cooling tower nobody knew to fear and a source nobody ever proved.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have either excuse.