World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

on the issue. “One set ofjournalists was accused of being ‘alarmists’ pushing fear to raise ratings; another was accused of being lapdogs placidly accepting EPA reassurances. Good information was hard to find.”

At first, the media least concerned with reporting on the environmental impacts were the local New York City papers, as 5 journalist Susan Stranahan points out in her piece, “Air of Uncertainty” in the American Journalism Review. (11)

“Not since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power & plant in Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size task of communicating complex information to a frightened public,” wrote Stranahan. “All too often after 9/11, however, journalists simply accepted the party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched the lives of thousands.”

Photo: Earl Dotter

The first to report on the environmental health aspects of the disaster were not The New York Times but national outlets such as Newsweek, MSNBC, CNN, and others. The first local reporter to flag discrepancies between official statements about health risks and independent studies showing otherwise, however, was Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez, who would write a book about it, entitled “Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse” (New Press, 2002).

While health and environmental issues should have been recognized as big issues, their full impacts didn’t emerge until later. Agencies really didn’t begin to manage these issues until about four weeks after the events took place in New York City. For example, disaster analyst Claire Rubin speaks of “the many problems and issues connected with the public management of health and environmental issues that began to emerge about four weeks after the attacks took place.”

But all these health effects were coming out as people already returning. Unfortunately, the “all clear” had already been given. What agency ever backpedals after it’s made a decision?

While there was plenty of “crisis intervention’’ for mental health in those early days and weeks following 9/11, there wasn’t a corresponding attention to environmental health. Yet city officials readily admit that they recognized it as being, besides a catastrophe on many levels, also an environmental disaster. Immediately, New York City was calling upon public health experts at universities and in government for expertise on the enviroiunental hazards at the Groimd Zero site and the neighboring area. The range of hazards was astounding, from asbestos to heavy metals to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) arising from the fires.

Some would say later that environmental health was not accorded enough attention. While there was plenty of “crisis intervention” for mental health in those early days and weeks following 9/11 for people in the neighborhood, says health advocate Claire Barnett, director of the group Healthy Schools Network, there wasn’t a corresponding attention to environmental health.

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