World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

in the many presentations he has done since September 11. “I have always been a big fan of coffee and this just reinforced its value.”

“We had been pushing to have it regarded as a Superfund site,” says Lippy, “so that OSHA hazardous waste standards would be brought to bear, but people in the political structure said ‘we can’t talk about it as hazardous.’ “

Lippy's union, fortunately, with funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) filled part of the gap by distributing respirators and training workers on the spot in the safest methods to deal with the potentially hazardous dust, smoke, and other hazards.

Every day for several weeks his team crossed the site and, using binoculars, watched to see every piece of operator of heavy equipment—cranes, earth movers, forklifts, etc.—and whether or not they were wearing the respirators as advised. Regularly less than half of the heavy equipment operators were wearing their respirators while working on the pile, often less than a third, his surveys found.

What was in the thick plumes of smoke that rose up from the tangled shards of steel and rebar had yet to be fully analyzed but there were serious concerns that it contained an assortment of combustion products, many of them carcinogenic, such as benzene, dioxins and furans; EPA had already found asbestos in the dust at levels of concern within the first few days.

By mid-October, Lippy had taken some 60 samples of the air and dust, looking in particular for traces of asbestos and heavy metals such as lead. Many of his samples did not show any siuprising hazards, corroborating other readings done by agencies like EPA, but there were enough concerns that he kept prodding workers to keep their respirators on, just in case.

The catastrophic losses of the New York Fire Departments Hazardous Material (HAZ-MAT) companies struck a blow for health and safety. “With their loss, we lost that expertise, and we lost the ‘haz-mat’ culture.” Later, however, his union would dociunent the presence of many hazardous materials besides asbestos, including lead, silica, arsenic and Freon. Just in the first week, between September 14* and 25*, workers would suffer 995 injuries, with eye injuries, blisters and headaches topping the list.

Most of all. Lippy led by example, wearing his respiratory all the time. As a result, after weeks and weeks on the site, he never got any “World Trade Center” cough.

A staggering number of respirators were given out by various agencies, says Lippy: “OSHA gave out 130,000; EPA about 22000, and the operating engineers, about 11,000, but it was unclear where they went,” he says.

Workers at the site resisted wearing respirators for a number of reasons. Lippy feels. For one thing, as construction workers, they were not used to wearing respirators, since they typically build things, rather than doing demolition work, and usually in an environment absent these hazards, not a blast zone following a terrorist attack.

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