World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

The job of researching worker exposures and industrial hygiene wasn’t easy, she discovered, as she lugged two 40 to 50 pound bags of air monitoring equipment on foot through the dark canyons of Lower Manhattan office buildings.

The first week they walked in from the Chambers Street subway stop, the equipment was so heavy and the atmosphere so smoky, it felt like “walking onto another planet,” she said.

“Everyone was working one hundred and fifty percent, 20 hour days. No one was more heroic than anyone else.” The researchers had to start early and stay late, since they were following the drivers and equipment operators, who worked in two 12-hour shifts. Because the air monitors could not be left overnight, she and her team would retrieve all the equipment, take it back to their hotel, and recalibrate it before turning in. Then the cycle would begin anew the next morning at 4 a.m.

“Everyone was working one hundred and fifty percent, 20 hour days,” says Geyh. “No one was more heroic than anyone else.”

Most draining of all, she found, was the sheer act of identifying and justifying her team’s efforts to the law enforcement officials guarding the site at entrance checkpoints.

At the Pentagon, by contrast, suggests Dodie Gill, of the Arlington County Employee Assistance Program, officials from different departments - Police, Fire, and Health - seemed to be more used to working together. The EAP itself crosses various official specialties.

To thwart any potential questioning of EAP’s authority at the site, says Gill, her team simply joined forces with the incident command, in this case the coimty Fire Department.

“We even put on fire fighter uniforms,” says Gill.

Environmental health professionals had a harder time at the World Trade Center site.

“We had to explain ourselves all the time—constantly justifying what we were doing onsite—which was primarily a service to the Teamsters, and also gathering research data for our own studies,” says Geyh.

Photo: EPA

Even though her team had authorization to be onsite, with badges from John Hopkins, not being police, fire or EMS, with recognizable uniforms, required some explaining.

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