World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Protecting the lungs of rescue workers Within a day or so after the two towers collapsed, there were already thousands of workers on the I scene, battling fumes, dust and constant J danger on the five-story-high rubble pile of Ground Zero, signing up for shifts that went I on through October. A few workers wore I flimsy dust masks that had been collected I from around the city. A few wore half-face I respirators. But most workers had no I respiratory protection at all, although the ' si? I “pile” was still on fire and emitting clouds of I thick smoke. Few tests had been done to I characterize what people were being exposed I to. Photo: Andrea Booher/FEMA New Photo

“We knew that we needed to get a handle on what was in that dust and smoke,” recalls Bruce Lippy, an industrial hygienist working for the International Union of Operating Engineers, representing the construction workers operating the cranes, forklifts, welding and heavy equipment that moved the large pieces of steel and debris.

From the minute he saw those pictures of the enormous dust clouds on his television set. Lippy scrambled to get funding from NIEHS to do safety consulting there. Within a few days, he traveled up to New York from Maryland to help protect the workers from his union, and after some delays in getting past security, made it to the site on September 17.

“People in the political structure said ‘we can’t talk about it as hazardous.’” Upon arrival, he was appalled by the dangers he found and the lack of attention to safety. “People calling the shots at the top were simply not focused on safety,” remembers Lippy, who kept a hawk eye on workers’ compliance with respirator use. “Respirators were worn much like loose neckties, hanging below the neck,” he described it later in a paper published January 2002, which he hoped would direct attention to the widespread occupational hazards at the site.

Yet the scale, duration and hazards at the WTC site were unprecedented, says Lippy, with physical hazards being perhaps worse than the potential respiratory hazards. For the average of industrial hygienist it was treacherous, he said, describing how a colleague fell out of the cab of a piece of equipment, fortimately missing a piece of rebar. “He could easily have been seriously hurt, if not paralyzed.”

Although it was far from a standard construction site, the workers there treated it as though it was. “The heavy equipment was very dangerous,” he says, since workers labored in the tight confines of a cab precariously balanced on a pile that was always shifting. “One worker went off for coffee and found that his equipment had fallen into a pile,” he says, telling a story he repeats

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