Sacramento Bee article on NYC air hazards, Oct 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

The Sacramento Bee - sacbee.com -- N.Y. air hazards found

The pollutants his team examined were collected beginning Oct. 2 from a rooftop at 201 Varick St, about one mile north of Ground Zero.

From the first few days, the scientists found high concentrations of "very fine" and "ultra­ fine" particles lasting two to three hours.

The Ground Zero readings surprised Nolan at the City University of New York in Brooklyn.

"These numbers of fine particles are higher than I ever expected ~ they're off the chart," Nolan said.

The conventional analysis used by the EPA captured the same range of particle sizes but averaged them in a way that smooths out the extraordinary peaks of the smallest particles.

EPA spokeswoman Nina Habib Spencer said the agency was obligated to follow its established monitoring methods.

"We are an agency of numbers and an agency of standards, and we adhere to those standards," she said Monday in an interview. "Just remember, those standards weren't built in a day.... We based what we said to the public on our data, and the standards we have available to us."

The EPA collected samples, mostly in December, in three smaller size categories, down to 0.3 microns, according to Werner. Results of that sampling are not yet available.

The UC Davis team's assessment was for even finer particles still. Their system collected and sorted particles smaller than 2.5 microns, in six categories down to 0.09 microns.

Even at those vanishingly small dimensions, size matters: The smaller the speck, the harder it is for the body to flush out.

Further, a mass of very small particles poses a greater risk than an equal mass of larger particles because each particle surface potentially can react with body chemistry to damage cells.

The EPA readings may have met the criteria for safe air, Cahill said, but the standard is inadequate under the circumstances.

"The aerosols from the World Trade Center are so anomalous that the criteria are irrelevant," he said.

Bruce Case, former director of the EPA's Center for Environmental Epidemiology, agreed.

"This was a unique event in many ways, and one of those ways was the types of human exposures produced," said Case, an asbestos disease specialist now at McGill University in Montreal.

"We don't yet know what those were, and I think it is possible that the data that has so far been reported, since it used traditional methods, was not necessarily the most relevant data."

Beyond particulates, much of the EPA's investigation has focused on the release of cancer­ causing pollutants such as lead and chromium, and asbestos fibers, contained in the fireproof *

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/medical/story/1622756p-1698856c.html (4 of 8) [3/4/2002 1:19:31 AM]

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