Law Department notice on WTC document preservation, Oct 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

quality concerns resulting from the WTC collapse, subsequent events have demonstrated that, ultimately, the public, Congress, and others expect EPA to monitor and resolve environmental issues. This is the case even when EPA may not have the overall responsibility to resolve these issues or the necessary resources to address them.

EPA has initiated many actions as a result of its own internal lessons learned exercises. Based on our review, we our making a number of recommendations to improve EPA’s emergency response capabilities in three areas: (1) contingency planning, (2) risk assessment and characterization, and (3) risk communication.

Agency and New York City Comments and OIG Evaluation In her August 8,2003 response to the draft report, the EPA Acting Administrator stated that she was proud of the men and women of EPA and that the Agency’s response was extraordinary. Although she generally agreed with the recommendations of our draft report (with the exception of Chapter 6), she responded that our report lacked sufficient acknowledgment of EPA’s efforts in several areas. For example, she noted that our report focused too heavily on the Agency’s press releases and did not sufficiently consider the Agency’s other forms of communication or the Agency’s “lessons learned” efforts. She provided several specific comments outlining the Agency’s disagreement with some of the report’s findings and conclusions. A detailed summary of the Agency response and our evaluation is included at the end of each chapter. The Agency’s complete response and our evaluation of that response are included as Appendices Q and R, respectively.

New York City officials responded to excerpts from the draft report and provided us with specific comments and clarifications which we incorporated into the final report, as appropriate. New York City’s response is attached as Appendix S and our evaluation of that response is attached as Appendix T.

iv Report No. 2003-P-00012

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