World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

testified before Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, saying EPA should have responded more quickly to concerns about indoor air.

“The City, in turn, delegated indoor air matters (testing and remediation) to individual building owners for indoor public spaces, and to tenants for indoor private spaces. The City provided little enforcement with respect to indoor public spaces and no enforcement with respect to indoor private spaces, and gave improper advice regarding hazardous materials testing and remediation,” Nadler testified.

“As a result of the EPA’s misleading statements about air quality and because it allowed the City of New York to handle matters related to indoor environments,” he continued, “there has been inadequate hazardous materials testing and remediation inside residential and commercial buildings downtown—putting the public health at risk.” (18)

Flip-flopping on cars For awhile, EPA started to exert its strength on environmental health, stepping in to butt heads with the city Department of Health over the issue of Ground Zero dust-contaminated cars. Hundreds of cars extracted from the parking garages around the collapsed buildings, the agency said, should now to be destroyed because of asbestos contamination, according to Greg Gittrich, writing for the New York Daily News, (5/14/02). (19)

The New York City Department of Health told Newsweek it would honor the EPA’s request, but that its decision to release the autos was based on careful review of numerous environmental tests.

“The data indicates that there is no significant risk to human health,” Kelly McKinney, the NYC Department of Health’s Associate Commissioner for Environmental Health was quoted saying. “The fundamental way we work is to gather as much data as we can, to look at that data, compare it with whatever standards are available, compare it with our knowledge of the issues, and that’s what we did with this issue as we have with every World Trade Center issue.”

Earlier, Newsweek reported. New York’s then-health commissioner Neal Cohen in December said that “the cars’ engines and bodies were contaminated with dangerous World Trade Center debris and would not be returned. Two months later, after owners of the vehicles sued the city to get them back, city officials reversed themselves and said they would release the autos—along with written instructions on how to clean them.” (20)

But this little feud between agencies was just one instance of many confusing inconsistencies in how the agencies applied environmental and health standards at the World Trade Center. Such jurisdictional conflicts and quandaries abound, according to Cate Jenkins, author of “A Docmnentary Basis for Litigation,” a compilation of himdreds of decisions and statements by agencies regarding the environmental health issues confronted at Ground Zero.

If EPA was cleaning asbestos-contaminated dusts in Libby, Montana, why did the agency not think it should address the issue of indoor contamination around the World Trade Center? If both the New York City Health Department and the EPA were to condemn asbestos-contaminated cars as unsafe, why were dust-covered buildings and apartments considered safe? If OSHA’s chief said that all dust should be “presumed to contain asbestos” were so many tests thought to be useful for residents? If children or the elderly, or those with respiratory problems were deemed at

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