NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Mayor Adams’ Year End Press Conference, Amazon Workers Strike in Queens, The Dangers of Lead Pipes, and Navigating Holiday Traffic

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

New York City Mayor Adams delivered his annual year end press conference to reflect on his accomplishments in 2024. Plus, Amazon workers at seven facilities are striking for better pay and working conditions, as customers await a flood of holiday deliveries. Also, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with Joshua Klainberg with New York League of Conservation Voters, about the risk presented by lead pipes. And finally, some tips to help you maneuver around holiday traffic this weekend.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivered his annual year-end press conference Monday one day after his former top aide was indicted. Adams tried to put a positive spin on a challenging year that included his own criminal indictment and a shake-up of top AIDS. We personified if you could make it here, you can make it anywhere. If you can make it in Adams administration, you can make it in any administration. Adams was set to have a court hearing Friday on his federal corruption case, but his lawyers rescheduled the hearing to January 27th,

a week after President-elect Trump takes office. Trump has said he would consider partnering Adams. The mayor has denied any wrongdoing. Amazon workers at seven facilities, including one in Queens, are striking for better pay and working conditions. as customers await a flood of holiday deliveries. The strikes are part of a new push by the Teamsters to get Amazon to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement

for better pay, benefits, and workplace safety. Delivery driver Latrice Johnson was at the picket line in Queens. We need better safety, we need better respect, we need better pay. I am a mom to a nine-year-old, and she's not everything, so we need that. Me and my baby, we need that. The company says it doesn't consider drivers' employees, but the union argues the company controls everything they do

and should be classified as their employer. Amazon claims the strikers are entirely outsiders and not employees. Thousands of lead pipes are carrying New Yorkers drinking water. After the break, we discuss the risk those pipes present. Stick around for the conversation. This is Amazina. President Joe Biden recently ordered all lead pipes carrying drinking water in the U.S. be replaced in 10 years. What does that look like for the Big Apple?

Well, in New York City, there are nearly 250,000 pipes carrying drinking water that are made of lead or may contain lead. Joshua Clamberg is the senior vice president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. My colleague, Sean Carlson, talked with him about the risk presented by lead pipes and what you can do about them. Can we just start by talking about what the risk of exposure to lead is? Lead is no joke. Lead's a poisonous, heavy metal. It can affect almost every organ and system in the human body. And it affects, you know, how people think and how they act. And we're talking cognitive issues, dropping IQ levels, behavioral issues, et cetera. And even small doses of lead exposure can be harmful. Okay. So how can New Yorkers find out if they have lead pipes in their homes? There is a mapping tool that's put out by the New York City Department of Environment. protection. There's also another mapping tool that we've put out through our organization at www. N-Y-L-C-V-E-F.org backslash NYC-L-L-C-L-L-C-Led Pipes. There's an online database that you can go and

look up your home address and you can see whether or not you have a lead pipe or a possible lead pipe, or if you don't have a lead pipe. So say somebody goes on that and they are pop it in their address there or whatever, they're going through the neighborhood, and they notice that their building has lead pipes. What do you do? How can you get them replaced? And who's responsible for that? The thing about lead exposure, as far as drinking water is concerned, is that it's avoidable, provided that you take some precautions. So if you were to run your water for at least a minute or so after long periods of stagnation. So if you think about it, when you go to sleep at night, first thing in the morning, the water hasn't been flowing through that pipe for a long period of time.

It's a good idea to run the water. There are free testing. you can get through the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, contact 311, and you can request a lead kit. But the most sure way to make sure that we don't have lead exposure is to get the lead pipe out. Even though parts of it run underneath the city street, the entirety of the pipe is the responsibility of the property owner. And so it's important if you own a home to hire a licensed contractor to do this work, or if you are a renter, you should probably tell the owner of the property,

the landlord about the presence of this and ask that person to have this pipe removed. What do you do if you are a renter and say you notice that your building is one of these buildings that has lead pipes and you tell your landlord that there's lead pipes there? And they just say, no, I'm not going to replace it or they're just taking too long to replace it. Is there anything they can do? There's very little recourse at this moment because there's not a mandate at the moment to have all lead pipes removed in our entire country. And if their landlord is not interested in doing this work, it's always good to contact your local city council member to encourage perhaps a citywide program that could ultimately lead to the removal of all the lead pipes.

You mentioned running the water to clear the line a little bit if folks do have lead pipes. But are there any other precautions people should take? Should they even be drinking the water at all? They absolutely should be drinking the water. Let me tell you, we have really some of the best drinking water on the planet. It's the largest unfiltered water system in the country. And lead is not found when it's traveling through the system. It's just when it's traveling through that pipe and gets into the building.

And so it's really, really a matter about flushing the water if you have a lead pipe, only using cold water for cooking. If you have an aerator for your faucet, clean that out. If you have a lead pipe connected to your building, does that mean there is lead in your water? First of all, you have to have a pipe that's corroding somewhat. You'd have to have water that would be somewhat acidic, a higher pH level, if you will. And, of course, as I mentioned, long periods of time of that water staying in the pipe. There are other ways that lead can get into the water. Physical disturbances.

If you think of a city like New York where there's a lot of construction and a lot of heavy trucks rumbling across, and if you have water sitting in a pipe for a long period of time and the pipe shake a little bit, that's another way lead could leach in there. That's Joshua Clamberg, senior vice president of the New York League of Conservation Voters, talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson. We're in the peak of the holiday season. And while many New Yorkers might be ready to jingle their way through the five boroughs, navigating the crowds and the chaos can feel like a full contact sport.

My colleague Tiffany Hansen talked with WMYC's news editor, Phil Corso, for a survival guide to getting around this holiday madness. So New Yorkers may want to avoid Midtown. They might want to get into the holiday spirit regardless. So where can they go and how can they get there without driving? Well, there are, of course, the light displays in Diker Heights via the D-Train to 79th Street. The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Lightscape and the Bronx Zoo's holiday lights are also accessible via multiple subway lines or the Metro North. But if folks do want to venture into Midtown, maybe to see the Rockefeller Center tree or the menorah at Grand Army Plaza,

those are reachable by taking the BDFM lines or the NR lines. For people looking for a little help to plan their trip, the MTA also just rolled out a trip guide called MTA. away for tips on routes, travel discounts, and holiday event details. You can find that at the MTA's website. All right, let's turn to these nostalgia trains. What's the buzz about there? So the MTA is running its first ever holiday metro north train. People might be familiar with the holiday subway cars. This is a lot like that with holiday lights. It's a vintage train and it runs every Sunday in December. Folks might remember the mess at Newark over Thanksgiving, Phil. A lot of delays blamed on staffing shortages, wondering if we can expect a repeat of that at airports around Christmas and New

years? It's unclear how the staffing shortages might affect travel this month, but the best advice we have, whether there's delays like those of Thanksgiving or delays thanks to winter weather, is to just stay updated. To get to the airports using public transportation, the Port Authority owned air trains connect JFK and Newark Airports to the region's rail network, and MTA buses link LaGuardia to Manhattan and Queens. All right. Any final advice? Brace yourself for crowds. and those never-ending security lines. And if you're flying, don't forget, the TSA has some quirky rules.

Your live lobster can fly, but your magic eight ball, not so much. And you can see a full guide about those TSA rules on our news site, Gothamist. That's WMYC's Phil Corso talking with my colleague, Tiffany Hanson. Thanks for listening to NYC now

from WMYC. Got a shout out our production team. It includes Sean Bowdage, Amber Bruce, Audrey Cooper, Owen Kaplan, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jared Marcel, and Wayne Schoenmeister, with help from all of my wonderful colleagues in the WNYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the people at Buck,

and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrado. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have a lovely weekend. See you on Monday.