World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Yet soon local and federal officials would be absorbed with managing the short and long-term environmental and health consequences of the tragedy. When it came to this, New York officials had little past experience to go on.

“It was a long, long day,” says Revella wearily, recalling the sequence of events of what was undoubtedly the most remarkable of his life. A veteran responder of some 200 disasters of all kinds, Revella says his experience with everything from tractor-trailer trucks overturning with hazardous materials, to chemical fires and explosions, to West Nile Virus sprayings didn’t come close to equipping him for the impacts of 9/11. “It was phenomenal,” he says.

A ‘pollution event’ The towers, with nearly three thousand people trapped tragically inside, started imploding in a shattering instant, then “pancaking” downwards with a physics that structural engineers struggled to explain afterwards. A week later, construction experts at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would describe the pulverized remains of the buildings as amounting to some 1.2 million tons of building materials. (3)

In New York, the collapse of the towers and nearby buildings created a vast, 16-acre disaster zone. The towers were so high and the “pancaking” effect so forceful that extraordinarily destructive forces were imleashed.

n &•’ ’I: I. *

s B'X S! I EliS ■tT? sslait R® biie’* I < * W* w. fl* rB'S!'-! I i'* Photo: Paul Olivier

17

NYC-WTC_000144935