World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

His congressional hearings spurred an avalanche of new information about the Towers’ collapse.

• The EPA’s Ombudsman’s office launched an investigation into the actions and response of the agency around the World Trade Center. • And the St. Louis Dispatch, in an article February 9,2002, unleashed a bombshell when it reported that the U.S. Geological Survey had a "team testing the particulate dust covering the immediate area [of the World Trade Center. They] foimd that some of the dust was as caustic as liquid drain cleaner and alerted all government agencies involved in the emergency response." The article reported that USGS officials are imclear as to why the EPA didn’t release the information. http://pubs.usgs.gOv/fs/fs-0050-02/fs-050- 02 508.pdf

“With its world-class laboratories and sensors that can detect minerals on a distant planet, the Denver-based team was already making arrangements to get NASA's infrared sensors and aircraft over ground zero as the EPA and the U.S. Public Health Service requested its help,” wrote Schneider. “Responding to requests from the White House science office, the NASA team flew over Manhattan four times between Sept. 16 and Sept. 23, while USGS scientists collected samples of the dust from 35 locations below.”

The towers’ collapse spewed enormous amounts of potentially lethal, extremely tiny particles of crushed and incinerated computers, glass, furniture and other building debris, unrecognized by the EPA’s air monitoring.

So why didn’t EPA make that information known to the public, Schneider asked?

In February, too, scientists at the University of California, Davis, reported that dust and fumes from the smoldering rubble exposed lower Manhattan residents to some of the highest levels of air pollution ever recorded. Thomas Cahill, a physicist and expert on air pollution who led the study, said his laboratory analyses of air samples showed that the towers' collapse spewed enormous amounts of potentially lethal, extremely tiny particles of crushed and incinerated computers, glass, furniture and other building debris uiu-ecognized by the EPA's air monitoring.

At the time, the researchers claimed months worth of government readings on post-Sept. 11 air pollutants' risks were woefully incomplete.

The atmospheric research group called DELTA, short for Detection and Evaluation of Long- range Transport of Aerosols, researches weather patterns and aerosols, the tiniest bits of pollution dispersed into air from a wide variety of sources. From Oct. 2 through mid-December, the group's rooftop air monitor clicked away on top of the Department of Energy office one mile north of Ground Zero.

Their equipment was registering unprecedented clouds of "very fine particles,” according to UC Davis researcher Kevin Perry, recently hired by the University of Utah to work as an assistant professor in the meteorology department. That, Perry said, should be a red flag in the evaluation of rescue workers' and residents' exposure levels. There is no definitive proof of the ill health effects from breathing gunk smaller than the PM2.5 standard.

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