Marine Park

Two bills in Council for steam radiator safety after Marine Park baby’s death

October 17, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff
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MARINE PARK — THE CITY COUNCIL on Wednesday held hearings on two proposed bills that would improve radiator safety standards citywide, reports Gothamist, following the tragic January death of 11-month-old Binyomin Zachariah, who was fatally scalded by steam from a bursting radiator pipe. Two other babies have died from similar injuries in the past eight years. 

CBS reports that Binyomin’s parents, Alex Kuravsky and Bessie Kimelfeld, rallied at City Hall with friends and family in support of Councilmember Farah Louis’ “Ben Z Law,” which would mandate annual radiator inspections in building common areas and apartments where children under the age of six live. The other bill, sponsored by Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, would upgrade plumbing and gas inspection and repair standards. Representatives from the departments of Buildings and Housing and Preservation and Development expressed concerns at the hearing that the bills would present a bureaucratic burden to the agencies, but also testified that the city has issued 1,600 radiator violations in 2024, 400 of them “immediately hazardous.”

“It’s a lot to come out and be vulnerable and share everything that we are thinking, but it’s something that we feel like we have to do. We want the world to know what happened, not because we want sympathy but because we want action,” Kuravsky told CBS.

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