The city cut the inspectors who watch the towers, and two Manhattan neighborhoods paid

Last July, a cooling tower in Central Harlem started pushing out a fine mist that no one on the sidewalk could see. By the time the city got it under control, seven people were dead and roughly 90 had been hospitalized, according to reporting by Gothamist and the city's own accounting of the outbreak. City health inspectors later traced the source to two cooling towers sitting on two city owned properties, Gothamist reported. The agency responsible for policing those towers was, in the same stretch, running its leanest cooling tower inspection operation in years.