World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

people returning to work in the nearby area.” In this, residents were advised to remove dust with wet rags and mops, rather than brooms, which could re-suspend the dust.

However, as the catastrophe unfolded, it became clear that the assortment of hazards at the disaster site at the World Trade Center would become a prolonged campaign and not simply a short-term event that could be cleaned up and disposed of quickly.

As public health experts all agreed, the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster was “unprecedented in the history of the United B.. States.” City, state and federal agencies itMWSS monitored conditions at the site for month and the city Department of Health (DOH) said it was “committed to working with the community to identify and address health concerns.” Photo: Andrea Booher/FEMA News Photo

A year later, researchers studying the dust and smoke in greater detail would characterize the conditions as having constituted a health “emergency.”

Re-establishing a command center First responders faced many difficult challenges in the chaos that ensued in the days after September 11, recalls DOH’S Kelly McKinney, the first of which was the complete decimation of the city’s “command center,” when its Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which was displaced in one of the adjacent buildings that collapsed, as mentioned in Part 1.

As a result, the “incident command system” upon which emergency responders depend did not operate and took about 48 to 72 hours to reconstitute.

The OEM, a descendant of the city's Office of Civil Defense and the Police Department's Office of Emergency Management, includes personnel from the Police and Fire Departments, Emergency Medical Service, and other city agencies, and was designed to deal with catastrophes such as a chemical or biological attack or a "mass fatality situation." (However, until the attack on the World Trade Center, it had never confronted such a dire threat; previous threats included the much feared Y2K computer virus, an infestation of longhorn beetles, and an influx of rodents. Ironically, the day of the attack, the office had been focused on the potential dangers of hurricanes and power outtages. “It's Hurricane Season in NYC," armounced its website.

For its part, the city Department of Health did follow an emergency response protocol that had been worked out in advance, including an incident command system: Laboratory, surveillance, epidemiology, medical and environmental response. “From the start, these plans and previously rehearsed exercises helped to organize the work and set priorities,” writes Susan Klitzman at the School of Health Science, Hunter College. (7)

By September 12, says McKinney, the department had already moved to a safer place and re­ established a headquarters and a set of critical functions to communicate among staff, press and

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