World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Captain Revella posted his staff in the middle of the street at truck routes around Ground Zero and had state Department of Environmental Conservation police stopping and inspecting trucks and forcing their operators to III enclose the truck beds completely with tarp, says McKinney.

“Uncooperative or argumentative drivers, or those who showed up at checkpoints untarped, would get their licenses confiscated by the Captain,” says McKinney. Revella was the first to get an air sample of Ground Zero, finding that the Ct power company Con Edison had an industrial hygiene group downtown. “That was the first air ill . t til ' quality data I saw from Groimd ■

I Zero,” says McKinney. Photo: Paul Olivier

Sadly, though, the captain was one of the few hazardous material certified experts not lost in the Towers—partly why his expertise as an EPA chemical-safety and hazardous-materials specialist with credentials enabling him to teach first-responders, was called upon that day.

Most of the New York City Fire Department’s hazardous waste teams were lost in the initial collapse of the buildings. That’s because most of the New York City Fire Department’s hazardous waste teams were lost in the initial collapse of the buildings, as if foreshadowing some of the dramas that would later be played out in terms of the controversy over the hazards of World Trade Center dust. The NYFD had committed some 75 percent of its teams, “nearly all its Special Operations units such as Hazardous Materials and Rescue teams to the World Trade Center.’’ (7)

It would be months before the full impact of the environmental devastation would be recognized. And many debates would ensue in the community and among workers over whether environmental officials had sufficiently considered the long-term hazards at Ground Zero. Those health impacts—and debates—would trigger controversial hearings at the city, state and even national level, and are still unfolding to this day.

Fortunately for the D.C. area, the terrorists’ target at the Pentagon, the vast 280-acre reserve in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., was not geographically situated in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban centers; the disaster there did not leave behind a mountain of toxic dust and debris that covered cars, trucks, building, and people, although fire did overcome many rescuers at the scene. (8)

At the Pentagon, too, huge plumes of smoke from the explosion that damaged the west side of the building also sent hundreds of toxic substances floating into the air, everything from pulverized concrete and glass to burning plastics; but these chemicals quickly dispersed and didn’t have effects on local populations. EPA sampled debris from inside the Pentagon for asbestos, lead and

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