Congressional response to EPA cleanup responsibility, March 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document ■SEP-13-01 12=07 FROM: ID: PAGE 2/4

■4 KONHEIM & KETCHAM 175 Pacific Street, Brooklyn. New York 11201 (718) 330-0550 FAX (718) 330-0582

Contact; Carolyn Konheim For Immediate Release 718-330-0550x122 September 12,2001

NO ASBESTOS THREAT IN ASH FROM WORLD TRADE CENTER

“One of the first steps in treatment of ash-covered victims of the World Trade Center blast by

some medical personnel yesterday was to hose them down to remove asbestos particles,

according to a report on WNYC this morning. Reports of this understandable, but Ofir urmcccssary, precaution may fuel the fears of New Yorkers that they breathed in hazardous

asbestos fibers in the dust clouds that enveloped so much of New York City yesterday. In

fact, there was no asbestos insiilation in the World Trade Center,” said Carolyn S. Konheim, a

former Assistant Commissioner in the New York City Department of Air Resources, who is

now head of a transportation and environmental consulting firm in Brooklyn.

“New Yorkers today are protected by a bold action at 7:00 a.m. on April 13,1970, when the

late Dr. Robert N. Rickles, in his first act as Commissioner of Air Resources, stopped

construction on the World Trade Center because spraying of asbestos insulation was causing a

snowfall of asbestos flakes on Lower Manhattan. On May 25,1970, Austin Tobin, then

executive director of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, pledged that the World

Trade Center would be built with an asbestos substitute, rock wool insulation, which had been

approved by physicians at Mount Sinai Hospital, the leading health researchers on the effects

of asbestos. The ban on asbestos insulation for all construction citywide, the first in the

world, was incorporated into the City’s pioneering Air Pollution Control Code of 1970,” Ms.

Konheim added.

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