World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

“The whole country was in shock. What does your mother do when she wants to show she care? She cooks. She gives you food. And everybody wanted to show they cared,” said McKinney.

So the food poured in, from everywhere to Ground Zero. But much of it had to be thrown out. “To serve food, you had to have a city DOH food certification,” he said, but hundreds of unlicensed feeding stations popped up.

“Port Authority had feeding stations for volunteers coming in,” says McKinney. “But we had to send in teams of sanitarians to shut down a lot of others. All that unauthorized food had to be trucked away.”

Authorized food, too, had a shelflife, of course. “There were piles of beef brisket sandwiches on crash carts with Gator Ade and granola bars. But that all started to pile up too,” he says.

Food sat on tables, with salad bars lying outside for hours, says McKinney. All of this had to be either vetted or disposed of. Any rotting or questionable food had been disinfected, using bottles of bleach, and all that hauled away as well.

Another unexpected problem was the volunteers leaving food around. “You had guys eating a bit of sandwich, then tossing it,” says McKinney. “There was waste everywhere.”

All that could have posed further problems with mosquitoes, since this was also, as mentioned, still West Nile Virus season and the weather was still warm.

Through tremendous efforts, says McKinney, these problems were managed. “The rodent problem was never really out of control,” he adds, “though we set thousands of rodent bait traps.”

An added problem was enforcement: Enforcing health rules wasn’t always easy with uniformed services. “Some cops got really pissed off,” he says. But over time, DOH altered its protocols to become “more collaborative” with other agencies. “We’d have to say, ‘This could make you sick. I’m ordering you to destroy that food.”

Then there were the restaurants. “The enormous amount of food downtown was a problem that we struggled with for weeks,” says McKinney.

Most of the 350 restaurants in the restricted zone around the World Trade Center were hastily abandoned by their owners on September 11, leaving huge amounts of spoiled food to be cleaned up and disposed of. The Pest Control office partnered with the Department of Sanitation to get into and clean another 92 closed restaurants.

Enforcing health rules wasn’t always easy with uniformed services. In the first few weeks, the Office of Pest Control inspected some 469 properties of all kinds, exterminating 388 of them with rat poisons and insect sprays. In the weeks to come, the office would inspect 535 establishments and exterminate 982 more.

The city Health Department reported that tests taken immediately after the blast showed “no evidence of any biologic or chemical agents.” Meanwhile, the Department advised residents and workers “to guard against dust and soot which can cause respiratory symptoms and eye and throat irritation,” and directed to the DOH website with a “Public Health Advisory for residents and

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