World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

material. Such a bomb has been compared to TNT, strapped to a container of plutonium or plutonium-contaminated waste. This kind of a device would not produce a nuclear explosion, but it could spread deadly radioactive matter across a swath of city.

According to Borri, the fear with a dirty bomb is that hundreds, maybe thousands, could die fi-om radiation poisoning and cancer, and the area could be poisoned for years. (Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, says Borri.)

That was fortunately not the case, Borri found, using a portable liquid scintillation counter, which measures radioactivity like a Geiger counter. The high-tech portable gadget he carried, one of the few available in the United States, is far more precise than its century-old cousin, the Geiger, counter with a much more refined ability to detect any kind of radioactivity.

“If you’re creative you can get what you need to without getting in another agency’s way pulling samples,” says Borri, who was dodging fire trucks and police vehicles and hordes of people streaming out of the building. “It’s not a good idea to walk into the center of the action. Some of the people weren’t walking as slowly as I was.”

Although Borri didn’t turn up any problematic radioactive readings by the end of the day, his work would be supplemented by the federal Department of Energy, whose technicians remained on site and continued to sample. [Only during the last days of the Groimd Zero cleanup would radioactive testers find any evidence of radioactive emissions, fi-om a pharmacy laboratory located within one of the buildings.]

The city’s Health Department also sent several other trouble-shooters to the scene immediately, says McKinney. Unlike inspectors with particular specialties, trained to adhere to a set of detailed protocols in specific situations (sanitary inspections of restaurant, for instance, or safety inspections at swimming pools) and unlike Borri, a radiation specialist, these seasoned trouble­ shooters were trained to identify and analyze unknown hazards in virtually any setting. “Their primary direction was to be the Department's eyes on the scene, and to commimicate to us detailed descriptions of emerging health hazards,” says McKinney.

“We heard the first boom in this office,” says Angela Carpenter, an environmental scientist working in the EPA Region II office. “Looking south to the tip of Manhattan, we had a direct view of the Trade Center, and there were some people who got a direct view of their family being killed.” He dispatched two public health sanitarians including Inspectors Mojgan Keshtgar and Yolanda Brooks, from the Office of Environmental Investigations, to the scene. “Keshtgar and Brooks drove the few blocks to the scene in a DOH Jeep Cherokee,” McKinney remembers.

“When Tower 2 came down they joined the fleeing crowd and ducked into a building a couple of blocks north of the Trade Center. Several other people followed them and they took cover behind the first unlocked door they could find, an electrical closet on the first floor of a Church Street office building. They stayed for about twenty minutes and then made their way out onto the street and back up to DOH headquarters.” The Cherokee, however, McKinney adds, was lost.

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