World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

That testing done in November and December may not have accurately portrayed the kinds of contaminants people were exposed to.

The Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry (ATSDR) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, together collected air and dust samples from 30 residential buildings in November and December 2001 in lower Manhattan in an effort to gauge whether there were levels of contaminants in the dust to constitute a major hazard. But the agencies had to acknowledge that their conclusions might have been skewed because the dust they tested was already several months old.

“By November, outdoor dust contamination was likely reduced by wind, rain, and cleaning (city workers vacuumed the streets and sidewalks with HEPA trucks). Indoor settled surface dust may have been reduced if areas were cleaned before being sampled. Therefore, these results probably underestimate the levels of World Trade Center-related materials that were in lower Manhattan immediately after September 11,” they wrote.

Plus, the contaminants were not uniformly dispersed—so that one could find high levels of certain pollutants in one area and not in another. They were heterogeneous, random mixtures of everything in the buildings—plastics from furniture, mercury from lightbulbs, including exotic metals like vanadium from computer parts.

The ATSDR wrote, for example, “A review of the building sampling results from this investigation indicates that there is not a consistent spatial distribution pattern of asbestos, SVF, dibuiiiiii iO mineral components of concrete, and mineral components of wallboard in air and settled surface dust. This indicates that the materials are heterogeneously distributed.” Photo; EPA (air monitors)

A key problem was that the teams of people and the tools for environmental monitoring were not in place to respond to an event like that which happened. Shockingly, even though the high particulate count from the building collapses was higher than New York City had ever experienced in its history, the tragic event violated no pollution standards for particulate matter.

That’s because the air quality regulations were set up to measure particulate matter loadings over 24 hour periods, rather than intense, short term bursts. Yet such a high-particulate storm, even lasting several hours, “can produce significant adverse health impacts,” wrote Eric Goldstein et. al. in the NRDC’s paper, “The Environmental Impacts of the World Trade Center Attacks.” Plus, these authors note, the same air standards did not adequately account for other health concerns arising from very fine particulate matter arising from the fires.

“We in the environmental health community are used to high probability events with low probability risks,” says Paul Lioy, “the effects of ubiquitous, low level toxic substances, their

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