Sacramento Bee article on NYC air hazards, Oct 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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

"There are a lot of reasons to believe that people who inhale very fine particles have a higher buying pool risk of lung cancer," he said. Shoppers buy in bulk because the more they Nolan lives within four miles of Ground Zero. "I have been coughing for four months," he purchase, the cheaper each said. item is. That same fiscal wit is propelling new In a way, the UC Davis findings are just scientific confirmation of what New Yorkers believe i®gislatiqiLin Califonii^ through common sense, said Michael Barasch, a New York lawyer who has filed health that could change how the claims against the city on behalf of nearly 1,000 firefighters, plus some police and sanitation workers. state purchases prescription drugs. For months, he detected the scent of danger in the air. "It was that acrid smell. It was clearly electrical things burning," said Barasch, whose office is two blocks from Ground Zero. Homeless men injured in "Every single person you would speak to knew it was not safe." fire near parkway Two brothers were The UC Davis analysis is continuing, but Cahill said he felt obligated to share results quickly discovered badly burned at to help New Yorkers take precautions to protect their health. an encampment near the American River Parkway Cahill's team sent a custom-designed air sampler to New York in October at the request of by firefighters who initially Robert Leifer, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Measurements thought they were Laboratory. The project was not fimded by the government; the UC Davis researchers responding to a grass fire. donated their time. Funds to publicize baby Cahill, 65, is a professor emeritus of physics and atmospheric sciences. He has used his law freed up background in nuclear physics to pioneer methods and tools for analyzing aerosols — tiny Later this year, particles suspended in the air ~ and has led more than 40 studies on pollution around the Californians will begin to world, including several in national parks and in the basins of Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake. see and hear The Ground Zero monitoring showed the fallout had subsided by late December, when advertisements aimed at Cahill's team stopped sampling. He said rain probably has cleared the air outside, but he is desperate parents who may concerned about New Yorkers returning to contaminated buildings. be thinking about abandoning their "These-size particles ... travel like a gas. They penetrate windows, doors, everywhere," he newborns, state officials said. "You don't feel it, and you can't see it." announced Monday.

He reconunended throwing away carpeting and fabrics that cannot be thoroughly washed, and cleaning everything else with water — not by vacuuming, which blows particles around. He suggested that people handling the cleanup wear soaking wet masks in lieu of respirators.

Fine particles almost always are byproducts of human activities, produced through combustion, typically power plants, or gasoline and diesel engines.

In trying to understand the presence of a high volume of extremely fine particles at the World Trade Center site, Cahill combed through reports and photographs of the towers' collapse. He believes the answer is in the way the second tower came down.

Whereas the first tower fell laterally, the second tower dropped vertically, like a rock. "You have 180,000 tons of mass moving at 120 miles per hour," Cahill said.

By his assessment, the superheated core of the building, buried under a giant pile of rubble with little to no oxygen, created a pressure cooker that broiled the concrete, glass, computers and everything else into infinitesimally small particles that were exuded in a gassy, lingering haze.

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