World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

generated in the presence of heat. Consequently, workers need to be protected from acid gases, too.”

Lippy feels that there were misunderstandings behind the decision to ignore the OSHA HAZWOPER standard. New York city officials felt that lower Manhattan might have been in danger of being declared a Superfund site if that standard were enforced.

Yet there were occasions when that standards was used, as when there had to be clean up of underground tanks, covered under HAZWOPER, rather than under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund).

*1 same time, too, OSHA considered the 3 recent cleanup of anthrax contamination as y JsS- ’X '41 covered by HAZWOPER, even though the Brentwood Post Office could hardly be RI regarded as a Superfund site. Another concern expressed at the site was that HAZWOPER would force workers into overly protective garments and respirators, slowing down the work and jacking up the price.

Photo: EPA

But Lippy points out that enforcing HAZWOPER only requires that the level of protection “be commensurate with the level of hazard,” as determined by assessing risks.

Most of these key practices of HAZWOPER—such as creating a site-specific health and safety plan, establishing zones of control, training workers, and decontaminating personnel and equipment - eventually became part of the procedures at Ground Zero. But according to Lippy and Carson, they arrived slowly and too late. Unlike the HAZWOPER requirements, personal decontamination was never mandatory at Ground Zero. Medical screening was not required and as a result not widely performed during the entire rescue, recovery, and cleanup.

Teaming up with Teamsters Alison Geyh, an assistant professor from John Hopkins University, was another technical consultant who came to New York City, with funding fi'om the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for a coordinated study of the disaster's potential health effects to workers. She focused her efforts on helping the Teamsters, checking the exposures of the truck drivers carrying debris away fi-om the site.

She would arrive at about 4 a.m., the start of a shift, when she would equip the drivers with small pumps and cassettes with filters to measure their exposures to particulates, asbestos and other pollutants. “A team of us put monitors at various locations in the debris to see what people were exposed to,” says Geyh (pronounced ‘guy’), “whether it was heavy metals or plastics being combusted.”

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