World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Two other Office of Environmental Investigations inspectors. Supervisor Peter Stallbohm and Inspector James Scullin, rushed downtown, in the absence of orders to the contrary, and found themselves in similar circiunstances. They fled the scene as well. Although Scullin survived the episode, he would later learn that the tragedy would take his own father, Arthur Warren ScuIIin, a Vice President at MMC who worked in Tower 1, says McKinney.

Within several hours, Revella, McKinney and several other key people in city government would have set up several temporary command posts and systems for monitoring the air and removing dust and debris. That included:

• Setting up Pier 25 for a barge that would move debris to Fresh Kills landfill • Getting legal authority for the Department of Sanitation trucks to move debris toward the barge • Securing permission from the city and state to re-open the landfill, closed for months.

From the very beginning, Revella helped enlist the aid of ironworkers to begin taking apart the charred remains of the World Trade Center and other buildings downtown. The cleanup needed anyone available who could cut steel. (21)

* “Do you have torches?” he remembers asking the union that day. “’Of course, we’re ironworkers,’ they told me. ‘Well, get on the MH pile, and start cutting,’ I told them.”

That first day, Capt. Revella was able to get some air samples through Con Edison, but U:-; a many environmental monitors were simply rp J clogged by the high-particulate dust. (22) .jMl! t - J

Photo: Andrea Booher/FEMA News Photo

From the federal Department of Environmental Protection offices, which looked on the Trade Center towers, employees watched as people leapt to their deaths—-some of them presumed loved ones. “We heard the first boom in this office,” says Angela Carpenter, an environmental scientists working in the EPA Region II office five blocks north of the WTC. “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.”

Reinforcements That first day, in response to what appeared within less than an hour to be terrorist-inspired events, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) activated its Federal Response Plan, bringing together 28 federal agencies and the American Red Cross to assist local and state governments in responding to national emergencies and disasters.

Within a few hours, according to its press release, the agency “deployed eight Urban Search & Rescue teams (US&R) to New York City to search for victims in the affected buildings. US&R teams are specially trained teams that include engineers and other technical experts as well as

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