World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

“We’re just trying to get a picture of what you’re breathing,’ we would say,” says Geyh, “and they’d shoot back, ‘You need to measure that?’” It didn’t help that their group of four researchers were primarily female in a largely male environment—and not part of the Red Cross or Salvation Army presence. The reaction, she said, was ‘What are you girls doing here?’” she laughs, but everybody was very generous and protective.”

Geyh herself wore a respirator when she felt the air quality had gotten so bad that she had to. “But you couldn’t do it all day,” she says. “It was too cumbersome.”

The reaction, she said, was ‘What are you girls doing here?’” Wearing a respirator made a difference. Some of the early findings showed, for example, that workers were being exposed to air containing 1,600 to 1,800 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter—hundreds of times what OSHA considers to be the highest safe level—at 10 micrograms per cubic meter. (And that OSHA standard is based on particulates untainted by asbestos, silica, heavy metals and other contaminants.)

All of Geyh’s air sampling was done at the Ground Zero site. But what was striking to her was the contrast between the level of pollution at ‘the pile’ versus a few blocks away. “But that’s not to say that the wind changing direction might not expose people if a big just of wind blew that caustic dust toward them,” says Geyh.

When it came to identifying what was in the dust and smoke the community was exposed to, that was left to EPA, the state and other agencies that collected thousands of samples. By and large, they continued to assure the public that there were no pollutants of concern.

“But EPA came out way too early about the safety of the site,” Geyh concludes. In many cases, the public wasn’t buying it, she says. “They’re saying, ‘How can you tell me this is safe when my eyes are burning and I’m coughing?’ ”

In hindsight, she says, “It would have made sense to do a lot more human monitoring to find out what people were exposed to and what was in the ambient air.”

Multi-agency coordination In the aftermath of any terrorist attack, the emergency response on the ground would likely involve hundreds of offices and agencies across government and across the land.

That was the case in New York City, where dozens of agencies struggled to re-establish connections to the city’s Emergency Operations Center in the first hours and days of the tragedy. Steve Touw, an On-Scene Coordinator with EPA’s Emergency Response team, arrived at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 12”', having spent the day before as a liaison to the city and FEMA and “finding out what the city needed from the federal EPA.”

Initially all the agencies were trying to re-establish communications. “Verizen just kept adding phone lines, as so many were out,” said Touw.

In days that followed, many national agencies would spill out of the D.C. area and head to New York’s Ground Zero. At its peak, there were some 30 different city, state and federal government

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