World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Public health officials say that public health system worked well under such high pressure.” The bottom lines was that 100,000 medical charts were surveilled and that went on through November,” Ron Burger of CDC. And scholars agree.

Amazingly, New York City was able to “weather this episode” despite the fact the state’s disaster plan had not been updated since the early 1990s, and, according to New York State Assemblymember from Manhattan Richard Gottfried, the plan “did not function” during the crisis, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz point out, in their report on September 11*.

“The episode reveals the enormous resources available in New York, and that the institutions themselves were able to implement emergency protocols quickly and efficiently, despite the chaos of the moment and the lack of clarity as to the true extent or nature of the disaster,” they wrote. (1)

Where did safety succeed best?

• EPA and city sanitation got much of the dust off the streets in the first days of the crisis, says Captain Terrance Revella of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. That greatly reduced the city populations’ exposures to the dust. • Although the city, specifically those designated agencies such as the Department of Design and Construction, can be faulted for failing to enforce worker protections, there were no fatalities at the site. • The Coast Guard’s able evacuation of people from Lower Manhattan spared people’s health as well as their lives.

At the Pentagon, officials credit the benefit of emergency planning drills; good coordination among agencies. In fact, today some community fire departments are trying to emulate the skills carried out at the Pentagon. Framington, Massachusetts, for example, is putting together an ‘incident command system’ that will create one system of response to be used by everyone--what Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has been calling for since last year. “ It’s important for local communities to have solid plans because local departments are always the first on the scene,” said one official there.

Despite the many successes, however, by the agencies’ own estimations, they were stressed beyond their limits.

EPA feels its responders were able to carry out their mission to protect human health and the environment. “Their response, though successful, was hampered by the unprecedented demand on Agency’s emergency response resources and by limitations posed by EPA’s still developing capacity to respond to terrorist events.”

Photo: EPA

Having so many air samples to run from so many agencies at one time stressed EPA to its limit. According to EPA, it was seriously tested by having to coordinate air samples being run by 13 different agencies, had to reconcile numerous different sampling protocols. It didn’t have enough facilities and equipment to quickly analyze samples given the volume of data; “The volume of

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