World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

"Stuyvesant High School should never have re-opened until the World Trade Center fires were out and the building completely cleaned and tested,” says Barnett, contributor to a book. Schools of Ground Zero, (12) published by Healthy Schools Network and the American Public Health Association. “That's what smart downtown law firms did. But they also had the money to make the smart choices.”

The local situation post 9/11 pointed up a larger national environmental issue, adds Barnett. “No one thinks of or plans for schools as children's workplaces; there is no system at any level of government to protect children from environmental hazards.”

Among the schools at Ground Zero, Stuyvesant took pains to test and clean its premises, after many contentious meetings between parents and school officials. But to this day, many schools in the area remain untested and uncleaned, say neighborhood advocates.

Stuyvesant parents and teachers were particularly concerned because their school stood directly across from a continuous stream of the trucks unloading hazardous World Trade Center debris en route to the landfill. The parent association hired its own consultant to test the air, who found it unacceptable.

On more than half the days between October 9* and February 2002, according to the consultant’s report, the level of respirable particulates, or dust, inside the school exceeded EPA guidelines for children; high levels of lead had also been found. (13)

Asked about the decision to site the barge there, DOH’s Kelly McKinney admits, “It wasn’t ideal” and that it triggered a lot of public protest “from an emotional standpoint.” Nevertheless, he adds, “looking at the challenge of moving 1.3 million tons of debris, sifting it and cleaning it, I don’t know how they did what they did. The job was done with low injuries and no fatalities.”

“Where else could we site it [the barge]?” says McKinney. “No I wouldn’t have wanted to live across from it, but we had guys inspecting to make sure tarps covered the trucks and there was a tremendous amount of data collected on the dust.”

However, the World Trade Center dust never quite settled in the public’s mind. “Environmental health issues were the ones that emerged and became more relevant and intense as time went on,” McKinney concedes.

Neighborhood resident Kim Todd survived the blast but lived to endure a shot of ailments connected to breathing the air and dust. Her case is unusual in that she breathed the high particulate counts of September 11 and 12 found in evidence that day. But how many others that weren’t evacuated also suffered? And in retrospect, did the city give the all-clear to return prematurely?

“I am extremely reluctant to criticize what anyone did in the first few days,” says Phil Landrigan. It was an unprecedented disaster for which the city could never have been prepared.” However, the leadership over the next few weeks and months for health and safety should have addressed public and occupational health far better than it did, he argued.

Like many, he acknowledges that the responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center involved, as he put it, “extraordinary heroism.”

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