World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

flight clearance by the Federal Aviation Administration, shortly after it had grounded all commercial planes.

Burger, the Senior Emergency Response Coordinator leading the CDC assistance to the New York City Department of Health's public health response to the World Trade Center attack he says, essentially “taught us the Federal Response System. He showed us that a variety of federal and state assets were available to us, and how to request them and how to follow up to ensure delivery,” says McKinney.

The federal “Syndromic Surveillance” system compares prevailing health care data—hospital admittance rates, patient complaints, physicians’ diagnoses, and even sales of cough syrup—to rates in the past.____________________________

Burger helped the city health department pull together its broad scale emergency medical efforts. He helped the city watch for signs of possible secondary diseases, including infectious diseases and the effects of dust and other debris and assisted rescue workers who had been injured or exposed to health-threatening materials, carrying out the the federal “Syndromic Surveillance” program. This system compares prevailing health care data—hospital admittance rates, patient complaints, physicians' diagnoses, and even sales of cough syrup—to rates in the past. If there is too much of a difference between them, flags are raised, signaling public health officials of an unusual trend.

Burger, who arrived on the afternoon of the 11* was also among those charged with making sure that the national pharmaceutical stockpile “push package”—an array of equipment and supplies needed by hospitals and emergency medical service people, such as sutures, bandages as well as antidotes in the event of bioterrorism—would safely arrive, which it did by early afternoon.

The cargo came on a plane when all others had been grounded, says Burger, and it “was the size of a football field.”

But many of the preparations made by CDC, like assuring adequate supplies of tetanus vaccine, would tragically not be needed.

As health officials were sadly to realize, however, no survivors were discovered in the wreckage after the morning of September 12*. “For several days, we all kept thinking there would be hundreds of survivors,” he adds. [Only four or five firefighters were found buried and rescued on the second day]

As a big city, too. New York had a large medical “surge capacity,” a large number of hospitals prepared to handle an abnormally large influx of patients. Tragically, in the case of this mass­ casualty event, there were many more beds and doctors available than survivors in need of medical care.

Medical triage That is not to say that the terrorist attack didn’t tax the hospital and healthcare system’s resources. The NYU Downtown Hospital, a few blocks from WTC, suffered power failures on September

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