Law Department notice on WTC document preservation, Oct 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

catastrophe, and research may ultimately prove these statements correct. However, this position was different from prior Agency pronouncements, and can create doubts in the public’s mind about EPA’s statements.

Communications Need to Disclose External Participation

As discussed previously in this report, EPA officials were not the sole determiners of the information that was included in its press releases, nor the information that was excluded. This was demonstrated by the EPA OCEMR Associate Administrator’s statement that residential cleaning instructions were deleted from a draft press release by the CEQ contact official. The extent of outside influence was further illustrated by the statement from the EPA Administrator’s Chief of Staff that she could not claim ownership of EPA’s early WTC press releases because “the ownership was joint ownership between EPA and the White House.”

In a time of disaster, EPA officials should be careful to ensure that EPA’s press releases reflect EPA’s professional judgment based on sound science, acknowledge the participation of outside parties, and provide accurate information about the environment to the public in accordance with EPA’s mission.

Environmental Data from Sources Outside EPA Need to Be Addressed

In the aftermath of the WTC collapse, several entities were involved in collecting data on environmental conditions. This included private firms; research organizations; Federal agencies; and State, local, and city governments. Several days after the attacks, EPA was designated as the lead agency for collecting and storing all of the WTC monitoring data. This designation did not include being the sole spokesperson for communicating the results of this monitoring data.

EPA was subsequently criticized for not including other organizations’ monitoring results in its public communications. For example, EPA was criticized for not putting the results of sampling done by the U.S. Geological Survey on EPA’s web site, or at least discussing this data. The U.S. Geological Survey monitoring had found high pH levels in the WTC dust, which reportedly contributed to the burning of respiratory pathways experienced by first responders and others who breathed WTC dust. An EPA spokesperson stated that EPA had not intended to keep the information from the public, and EPA thought the information had been posted on the U.S. Geological Survey’s web site. EPA officials also told us that the high levels of pH found in the dust was to be expected because of the pulverized concrete.

66 Report No. 2003-P-00012

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