Meet Jegan Abraham, Director of NYCHA’s Office of Water Quality

Making sure that residents have access to clean, safe water is one of NYCHA’s top priorities. In late 2022, NYCHA’s Office of Water Quality (OWQ) was established to centralize and ensure the Authority’s control of water safety and quality issues in all of its developments. The OWQ assesses and addresses any level of bacteria detected above current regulations in residents’ water systems.

OWQ Director Jegan Abraham is a native New Yorker, a chemical engineer by training, and a passionate pursuer of water purity and quality for the hundreds of thousands of NYCHA residents he serves. We spoke with Mr. Abraham to learn more about what drives his passion.

Can you explain what you and the Office of Water Quality do for NYCHA and its residents?

The main focus of the Office is to look at any possible incoming contaminants in the water and prescribe a solution. A lot of our work this year has been on the control and elimination of any trace of Legionella, and we’ve also had the opportunity to do a good bit of lead remediation at several of NYCHA’s childcare centers.

How have your background and experience prepared you to head the Office of Water Quality?

My background is in chemical engineering, specifically in industrial water treatment. I came from the private sector originally. I have worked with non-potable water systems – for instance in cooling towers – and I’ve also worked with domestic water systems, as one sees in residential buildings and hospital networks. I also have experience in heavy industry – think power plants, pulp and paper mills, things like that. But through all of that varied experience, my focus has always been on industrial water management, all throughout my career. That’s what brought me to NYCHA too, when I heard that the OWQ was being launched.

Would you tell us a bit more about yourself and your background?

I guess I count as a lifelong New Yorker. I was born in Brooklyn, I spent most of my childhood in Nassau County, Long Island, and then I went to school upstate, at a very environmentally friendly school called SUNY ESF – The State University of New York, Environmental Science and Forestry. At SUNY ESF, I focused on chemical engineering with a focus on environmental factors. Since then, I have worked in industrial water management for my whole career.

With such a strong focus on water management, did your engineering education include any study of biology?

I did take quite a lot of microbiology classes in my student days, yes, but my real introduction to working with these biological factors came on the job, while working. Just when I started my career, Legionella management came to the forefront of the industry’s attention in a lot of New York City. There was a major outbreak in 2015; when that outbreak happened, a lot of new regulations were put in place, and a much greater focus on domestic water systems came into the picture. At NYCHA, of course, a lot of our work necessarily focuses on domestic water systems. At the Office of Water Quality, our whole first year has really been about these sorts of issues. What we are trying to do is implement effective management programs – programs for monitoring water quality, for testing the results we get, for figuring out what those results mean, and for implementing optimal response and remediation measures as swiftly as possible.

It sounds like complex work.

Yes, but it’s fun work, it really is. And it’s impactful.

When residents hear “Legionella,” they quite naturally become fearful. It’s totally understandable –we’re talking about people’s access to water, for goodness’ sake! Residents naturally worry about the safety of the water they and their kids need for drinking and cooking and washing.

So a major part of our role at OWQ is to communicate. We need to let people know that we are here to protect them, and that we have the expertise and the experience necessary to handle it successfully. We have successfully handled remediation situations before, and we can handle whatever might come up.

A lot of what we do in the OWQ is go to residents’ meetings, to tell folks about what we are actually doing for them. We show them the results, the real progress we make with each case. So while the work can be challenging at times, it’s also tremendously rewarding. The opportunity to make a genuine difference, to help residents feel at home – that’s why most of us work at NYCHA. It’s why I do, for sure.

To do this job right, you really have to be passionate about the work itself as well. It’s not just 9-to-5 – I think about this stuff 24/7. I really do. I’ll be at my dinner table sometimes, and it’ll come to me: “Holy cow, that’s how we’re gonna do it!” You’re always thinking about how to solve this or that problem, how can you get to a better solution. Some of these questions can’t be solved on a 9-to-5 schedule. You don’t know when that answer is going to hit you.

It sounds like your approach to science and engineering involves quite a bit of inspiration.

Well…when I see a problem, I do need to let it percolate a little bit. I always think that there’s a good solution, there’s a best solution, and there’s a workable solution. And then we kind of have to figure out, what can we do in this given scenario? Sometimes it takes some time to get to that answer.

But that how I tend to do it. I try to look at a problem, try to see if I have all the data and variables for it, and then really think on it and see which will be the best approach going forward. The OWQ has had a lot of success this year, and we are excited to build on that success next year and going forward.