World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

In this authorization, the President gave FEMA “an unprecedented level of assistance.” For example, the President gave FEMA enough fimding to pay for 100 percent of public assistance activities in New York and at the Pentagon (typically, states pay 25 percent of these costs). This would mark “the first time FEMA covered the entire share of public assistance expenses,” according to the text of an October 3 White House fact sheet on responding to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

That filtered down to city agencies as well.

“For the first time I can remember, we didn’t have any resource constraints,” recalls the city DOH’s McKinney. “I could call anyone and say, I need this or that; there was no problem with contracting processes.”

Conclusions Certainly, because of the complexity of the issues confronting the city, there was a need to call in federal officials from many agencies. With its new authorization, FEMA assigned 11 Federal agencies to respond to the attack. Among the Federal agencies it tasked to respond were the Department of Defense, Army Corps of Engineers, USDA Forest Service, Public Health Service, and EPA.

Environmental health essentially fell under two agencies: EPA and Health and Human Services (HHS). According to the White House fact sheet on the agencies’ mandates, EPA, which had in the first two weeks provided 200 of its personnel, dealt with: “monitoring the disaster sites to ensure that rescue workers and the public are not facing dangerous environmental risks”; “cleaning and washing down of all workers, equipment, and resources employed during the rescue stage; “sampling air, water, and asbestos as well as conducting radiological and dust monitoring”: “vacuuming and cleaning sidewalks, streets, and buildings in the World Trade Center area.”

HHS had made available “about 100 doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to staff two treatment stations to provide roimd-the-clock medical care to rescue and recovery workers toiling in the aftermath of the attack in New York City.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had also sent people to assist the New York City Health Department in tending to patient care and whatever was needed from a health standpoint.

But when it came to managing the enviromnental health side of the situation, some say there should have been an even stronger federal management role.

“It was clear that at the local level New York officials weren’t ready to respond to something of this complexity.” “FEMA should have been designated to oversee the catastrophe,” says Paul Lioy, a professor of environmental and community medicine at the University of Dentistry and Medicine at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “But this agency was used to mud, floods, and natural disasters—not dust, like one would have in an industrial accident.”

It was a mistake to have local agencies manage the environmental aspects of the crisis, according to Lioy, because “the local agencies were not prepared to respond to a disaster of this scale.”

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