World Trade Center environmental data report, 2001-2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

special risk from respiratory hazards, according to the city Health Department, why were pregnant women considered not at risk? If FEMA grants were given to professionally clean buildings, why was it okay for residents to do it on their own?

“It’s like that line from the film Casablanca, ‘Round up the usual suspects!’ But the usual suspects weren’t the problem.” Indeed, as many reporters, like Andrew Schneider, a staff writer with TJie St. Louis Post Dispatch, wrote, people living on the lower part of the island felt abandoned by the city, fed so many bits of conflicting information by different agencies.

“The agencies really didn’t know what they were doing,” says Kim Todd. “They seemed to not have a clue.” Residents, she said, did their own tests and came up with substances that the agencies couldn’t even identify, let alone certify as safe, says Todd. “I found something called kaolin. What is that?”

While asbestos removal seemed to be a highly technical procedure, and workers were warned of asbestosis, why was it suddenly safe for downtown residents, Todd wondered. “My imcle was an asbestos worker and died of it. No one will know until ten years from now how sick we’ll be.”

Tammy Meltzer, leader of the tenants' association at Gateway Plaza on the edge of Ground Zero, told The Boston Globe that city-hired cleaners had removed dust from the residences in October and November 2001 before occupants were allowed to return. "But the fires were still burning in late December," Meltzer told the Globe. "Nobody came back to do any retesting. We don't know if our apartments are safe."

Deeper criticisms Today, Thomas Cahill, co-author of the DELTA study faults EPA for failing to realize the serious repercussions of the World Trade Center on the urban environment.

“They did a marvelous job at first, racing in with great bravery into the smoldering pile,” says Cahill. “But the agencies involved should have realized that this was not a typical building collapse, especially with the huge volume of building materials on the pile continuously burning.”

It wasn’t so much that they didn’t do things right as that they did things too much by the book, failing to get beyond the standard measurements under the clean air act, and failing to recognize how extraordinary this ‘pollution event’ was.

“It’s like that line from the film Casablanca. ‘Round up the usual suspects!’ But the usual suspects weren’t the problem, Cahill says.

In a survey done in May 2002 regarding public health issues following September 11, residents of lower Manhattan expressed more concern about air quality than they did about another terrorist attack. Cahill believes that the volume of dust, the high particulate counts, the fineness of the dust, and most importantly, the final aerosols in the anaerobic fire under ‘the pile’ that caused the most danger to the public in releasing unprecedented levels of carcinogens.

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