New York Times article on EPA apartment cleanup plan, 2002

NYC-WTC_000142651 Г8nen-n2l A crusader cheers feds decision ignt months aro, environmental * lawyer Joel Kupferman was one ‹ the few voices challenging the fe eral Environmental Protection Agency's assurances there was no health threat to the public from pollutants released by the World Trade Center collapse. Kupferman, who has operated his tiny New York Environmental Law and Jus- tice Project on a shoestring budget for years, could often be found in his second- floor office across from the EPA's build- ing, working late into the night as he com- piled hundreds of complaints from ten- ants. homeowners and office workers about the air quality in their buildings. When he wasn't writing down com- plaints and fighting with landlords, he was filing Freedom of Information re- quests to various government agencies to obtain hundreds of pages o! environmen- tal test data. More than one government official la- beled him a kook. But to the many wor- ried inhabitants of lower Manhattan, Kup- ferman soon became the people's lawyer — the only one who helped them without demandine a fat fee. So yesterday, when the EPA did an about-face and finally announced the fed- ral government would clean up some 15,000 residential apartments below Ca nal St., Kupferman was sitting upfront in the audience at the jammed press confer- ence. He wore a stylish new gray pin- stripe suit for the occasion - and a big smile across his face "The EPA cleanup is long due," said Mayor Bloomberg. "It is better to err on the side of cau- tion." lep. Jerrold Nadle D-Manhattan), who rep JUAN GONZALEZ resents the area, got most of the press atten- tion. Of all the politicians in this town, Nadler has fought the hardest to get EPA to assume responsibility for indoor cleanup. In the days after Sept. 11, the EPA and the Giuliani administration divided the clean- up tasks. The city agreed to monitor the quality of indoor air, and the federal gov. ernment would be in charge of the out- door air problems. But officials at the city's Department of Environmental Protection have since ad- mitted that they relied on individual build- ng owners to test and clean up their ow properties and did only sporadic monitor ing. The fact is that monitoring 15,000 apartments and hundreds of commercial buildings below Canal St. was too huge a task for the DEP Nadler has been insisting for months that under the federal Na- tional Contingency Plan the EPA must be the lead agency for cleaning up any releases of hazard- ous materials. By an- nouncing that the Feder-. al Emergency Manage- ment Agency would pay or cleaning up all apart nents below Canal St and that the EPA wurld supervise the ef- fort, the agency finaily gave Nadler his due. This does not mean there is any "imme- diate" health danger from pollution, said EPA regional administrator Jane Kenny —something the agency has been saying from the beginning. But to ease worries about long-range health effects, the gov. ernment is now prepared to do a com- MOD EO plete cleanup. The EPA cleanup, howev- er, is only for individual apartments. not for hundreds of office buildings. And it is not clear that the common spaces of any Asbestos primary concern he cleanup Will center on. asbesto So far there are no dians to test buld ings for other contahhittants, such as mer- cury, lead or dioxin. "We applaud the fact EPA is finally ac- cepting i..ponsibility," Kupferman said. "But we want to be sure they eliminate all pollution, and I'm not sure this will." According to Uday Singh, an industrial hygienist, for instance, conventional methods for cleaning up asbestos will not necessarily remove mercury contamina- tion. "It is practically impossible to re- move mercury unless you use a HEPA fil. ter machine fitted with an activated char_ coal filter," Singh said. Much remains to be answered abour this new cleanup effort. But after months of being dismissed as a kook, Kupferman and the people he helped could say they were finally heard. E-mail: [email protected] NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document