WTC firefighter memorial article, Sep 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

dential areas downtown. They came up with some disturbing results. Testing in­ side three randomly selected apartments, for example, revealed that carpets and cur­ tains were inundated with dust that was laden with copious amounts of asbestos and other unpleasant materials. Because many residents and business owners have not hired professional asbestos-abatement services to do their cleanup, it is not un­ likely that many indoor surfaces are still on the Web, and we also go to a lot of ten­ contaminated. ant meetings to speak directly to them.” Another independent study—this one However useful a broader collection of commissioned by the board of directors of data might be, elected officials and others a small park in Tribeca—found danger­ say that they’ve had problems addressing ously high levels of asbestos coating the the glut of information already available, playground, prompting embarrassed gov­ much of which is also in the public domain. ernment officials to close it down after chil­ Mr. Nadler, Ms. Wils and other officials plan dren had been playing there for days. to assemble their own team of researchers to pore over the data that has already been Fears Not Abated gathered, and to offer an analysis independejj^ According to Ms. Wils, residents are far of those offered by government agencies. * from convinced that the peril has passed. In the meantime, Mr. Nadler remaiS “People have gotten sick from this, getting skeptical of the assurances offered to dowC headaches,” said Ms. Wils. ‘‘We should be town residents. “People in authorit)' are a!waJR making a much greater effort to find out going to tell people that things are safe, and to what this all means." The unease has only move back and not to worry about anything,” grown since the late December revelation he said. “You can never say that anything is that a quarter of the 6,500 firefighters who perfectly safe. This is an unprecedentS w did rescue work at ground zero have fallen event and an unprecedented tragedy, and itS ill with respiratory ailments. clear that there are limitations to what sefi ’' ■ j udgirig ¥y thehuinbers,<ho<we ver, the ence can tell us right now.” u results of the research that has been made available ‘to the public is lai^^-encour­ 1 T aging. In the areas the E.P.A. tested, for ex­ ample, levels are consistently below gov­ ernmentally dictated danger levels of asbestos. And the more that time passes, the more those levels are likely to diminish. An E.P.A. spokeswoman, Mary Helen Cervantes, pointed out that the agency continues to test for a wide range of pol­ lutants in and around ground zero, and said that the E.P.A. has gone to great lengths to put the public at ease about potential dan­ gers. "A significant piece of our involvement has been providing that information to the public,” said Ms. Cervantes. ‘‘A lot of it is

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