Building owners release form and meeting coordination, April 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

visible debris or dust was observed. In the one case where DEP was able to take samples, the sample came back positive and DEP verbally requested a cleanup and the landlord complies. As I write this, DEP has received 58 referrals from the WTC Hotline; 46 have been resolved and 12 are in progress.

Parks released testing information and cleanup of said parks; only one park tested positive.

DCAS will be sharing with us, as well as EPA’s Indoor Air Working Group, the test results that they have on 20 City-owned buildings as well as 40 leased City buildings. They will add to their report the same fields as we have in our Private Owners testing results report so that City Task Force and EPA Working Group can use and plot the information as needed for their studies.

DEP’s Private Owners testing report was shared with DOITT’s contractor, Plan Graphics: DCAS’ Sylvia Price; and Dore LaPosta from EPA. Before releasing said information, Lai-Sun and Steven Levi from NYC Law gave the okay to share it among the groups. Law’s position was that health and safety should be the groups number one concern. They noted that everyone involved should keep their files in good order since they expect many claims in the future. The next meeting of the Legal group is Wednesday, 10:00 AM, at HPD. I also mentioned to Lai and Steve that DEP was working on sending out a letter to buildings owners, in which DEP identified as having debris, to allow contractors access to the property so that it may be cleaned up. I told them that Mark had the letter and had some issues with our draft. Mark for your information. Asbestos has another draft of said letter including Russell’s comments. Asbestos will forward it to you on Monday.

I reported at both meetings about DEP’s progress in securing the contracts for the exterior cleaning of buildings. Bottom line is if everything falls into place, we can begin sometime during the week of April 8. We still need to speak to some of the Real Estate organizations and I asked OEM to help in setting those meetings. I’m not clear if OEM was gong to help although they indicated they could. However, to be safe, maybe we should reach out ourselves with help of the Public Outreach group (Laurel Blatchford). Laurel left the meeting early before I could get to speak to her. We already have a meeting scheduled with REBY for next Thursday.

All group members were impressed with our progress especially EPA who asked me to thank Diana and Bob personally for all that DEP has done.

Staff members are meeting today, Thursday 28, with FEMA and the Landmark Preservation people to go over cleanup procedures. Landmark wants to be clear in their minds that cleanup procedures will not be damaging to buildings (i.e., using acid washes - which we don’t).

DOH approached me today asking for DEP’s comment on the action levels being proposed for cleanup of asbestos. We have not seen the proposed action levels and DOH will e-mail me with the particulars. I will share with the technical staff as well as have the technical staff listen in to Monday’s conference call of the Chemicals of Concern Working Group. DOH believes that EPA is going down the road of abating lots of apartments downtown. I gather from my conversation 2

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