World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

the level of asbestos contamination up to seven blocks away from Ground Zero was comparable to or higher than that found at the recently designated Superfund site in Libby, MT.

In an earlier December memo, Jenkins first criticized EPA for effectively "waiving" federal asbestos guidelines and endorsing more lenient cleanup methods. (12) She wrote that EPA’s own tests showed that more than a third of the agency’s bulk dust samples for asbestos were higher than 1 percent—the agency’s ‘action level’ under federal Clean Air Act standards.

She argued that the 1% level was only to be used to identify materials as containing asbestos, not as a standard of safety. That law, she argued, requires elaborate and strict procedures for asbestos removal to be followed and the use of trained asbestos cleanup companies.

"We haven't waived any regulations," Walter Mugdan told a reporter for the Daily News, The agency's regional counsel insisted Jenkins was misreading the law. "She [Jenkins] assumes that they [the regulations] apply to the cleaning up of dust in residential or office buildings in lower Manhattan.

"When they were written, they were never intended to apply to something like a terrorist act. These regulations apply to owners and operators of a facility who are carrying out a demolition or renovation. They were never contemplated to apply to someone cleaning an apartment," Mugdan said.

Jenkins, meanwhile, argued that the agencies may have ignored some potent health hazards. “I think people really are at risk here, because unless there is thorough and effective cleanup, people are at risk of breathing asbestos fibers, and once they get in their lungs, they never go away.” (13)

Because microscopic asbestos fibers are so small, they can hang in the air and, when inhaled, penetrate and irritate the lung, she says. And studies have shown that breathing in airborne asbestos fibers can lead to a variety of ills—mesothelioma, or cancer of the lining of the lung, lung cancer and asbestosis, a thickening and scarring of the lungs.

Jenkins compared dust samples drawn from New York apartments in an independent study done by the Groimd Zero Task Force with similar samples drawn from houses in Libby, Montana, a small town designated last December as a Supcrfiind site after a surrounding vermiculite mine released deadly asbestos fibers into the air, allegedly killing hundreds. As a Superfund site, Libby was automatically added to the EPA’s National Priority List of toxic sites to be monitored and cleaned.

Although there weren’t many samples, says Jenkins, these results suggested that lower Manhattan could be eligible for listing as a Superfund site, the criterion being that its contamination, like Libby’s, poses “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health.”

For example, one sample of dust from a windowsill in an apartment on Warren Street, four blocks away from Ground Zero, had 79,000 fibers per square centimeter of asbestos, some 22 times the highest level found in house dust in the town of Libby, which has just 5,000 residents, she notes.

Considering that Manhattan is so densely populated, and other pollutants are an added concern, its residents may be arguably at greater risk than officials admit, Jenkins believes.

Others agreed. Joel Kupferman, director of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, requested that the EPA and state of New York designate the World Trade Center site as

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