Cooling Tower Regulatory Inspection Results NYC - Assignment 1

Approach

For this assignment, due to the recent Legionnaires’ Disease Cluster on the Upper East Side, I plan to use the NYC Cooling Tower System Inspection Results dataset from NYC Open Data. The dataset contains information on cooling tower inspections across New York City, including building IDs, inspection dates, boroughs, inspection types, violation codes, violation descriptions, and violation categories.

I chose this dataset because it focuses on environmental health and cooling tower inspections regulated by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), which are key to taking preventive actions.

I intend to work with a smaller set of the most helpful columns, making the column names and values simple to understand.

An anticipated challenge is that the dataset has about 124,000 rows and 22 columns, and each row represents a violation cited under Chapter 8 requirements of DOHMH during an inspection; inspections with no violations have blank violation fields.