Chemistry.org article on WTC dust analysis, Dec 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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B QUICK Finil > World Trade Center dust analysis offers good news for N Yorkers Meetings Source: American Chemical Society News Service Publications Publication date: 2002-12-23 Careers and Jobs Chemical Abstracts (CA^ The rubble has been cleared from the World Trade Center site, but questions still Io Or!!ine Stpre What's New about the long-term health effects on people who survived the terrorist attacks. A ne of dust samples taken from around Manhattan in the days following Sept. 11, 2001, offer some much-needed good news. jU^nACS now A team of researchers tested debris from the collapsed towers for toxic organic ACS Membership Benefits chemicals and found that the potential risk of exposure from inhaling such comp was lower than expected. The findings are scheduled to appear in the Feb. 1 pri edition oi Environmental Science & Technology, a peepreviewed journal of the News American Chemical Society, the worlds largest scientific society. The article wa Stocks initially published Dec. 18 on the journal^ Web site. Companies People The scientists were looking specifically for persistent organic pollutants— highly Email News compounds that pose a special problem because they endure in the environme can be toxic to humans and wildlife. They found no evidence of high levels of tw Help particular POPs: pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls, which were used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications until their production was ba 1977.

The team did, however, estimate that the dust covering lower Manhattan contai between 100-1000 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — a group of comp containing some that are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agenc probable human carcinogens. But, while the amount of PAHs was high, the dust particles to which the chemicals stuck were large enough to stay out of a person lungs, according to Paul Lioy, Ph.D., associate director of the Environmental an Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, N.J., and an author of the

“The fact that the particles were primarily above 10 micrometers in diameter wo mean that the deposition was in the upper airways of the respiratory system and readily cleared than fine particles, which would deposit deeper in the lun^, Lioy “That means, in terms of potential lifetime exposures, wdre probably going to b. lucky in that these may not be exposures of significant health risk."

Immediately after the attacks, the majority of people focused their attention on asbestos, Lioy says. But he and his colleagues felt the only way to understand t--t- situation was to determine everything people could possibly have been exposed contrast to what we normally do every day in environmental sciences, this was catastrophic event,” Lioy says. “We had no clue what was in there and what siz ranges, so our goal was to do a full characterization of the entire aerosoR

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