Law Department notice on WTC document preservation, Oct 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Sampling and Data Collection Protocols Needed

EPA, other government organizations, and non-governmental organizations undertook extensive monitoring efforts in the months following September 11. Extensive sampling was done around the work zone to monitor conditions for first responders. To assess ambient conditions for the general public, EPA established an ambient monitoring network in coordination with New York City and New York State officials. EPA also developed a draft Quality Assurance Project Plan for the WTC ambient monitoring network; however, the plan was not finalized.

A comprehensive Quality Assurance Project Plan outlines the objectives of the monitoring, identifies the monitoring and sampling methodologies, identifies the siting of monitors, and outlines monitoring exit strategies. In essence, the Plan helps to ensure that sufficient data is collected of adequate quality for the decisions to be made.

The Quality Assurance Project Plan should also address the format and means of transmitting data. In the WTC response, various government agencies collected a large amount of environmental data for Lower Manhattan in the months following September 11. The Office of Environmental Information maintains the New York City Response Monitoring Data Retrieval database, which stores the monitoring data collected by the various Federal, State, and City environmental agencies involved in the response. According to a report prepared by an EPA contractor that analyzed trends in the data, the database contained 263,000 monitoring results for 605 contaminants through April 24,2002. Because the data came in different formats, consistent sampling, monitoring, and quality assurance information was not provided for each of the pollutants monitored, and in many instances this data was not provided. Our review of information in the database confirmed the trends noted by the contractor. _

Providing standardized guidance for the organizations reporting data to EPA would improve the consistency of the data. A complete data set would make future assessments of the data easier to complete. Both EPA Region 2 and EPA Headquarters’ Lessons Learned reports made recommendations to improve data collection. The Region 2 Lessons Learned report recommended that all organizations submit data in an electronic format, and standardized formats should be used as much as possible. The report also recommended that easy-to- understand context and explanations be provided for the data, to allow data and risk assessments to be released to the public more quickly.

EPA’s Office of Environmental Information has created a standardized template for future responses by making a generic shell of the New York City Monitoring Database. This Office is also exploring longer-term improvements. With regard to WTC data. Region 2 officials have been working to improve the data in the “NYC Response” database by requesting that organizations perform a quality assurance review of the data they submitted to EPA. Once this process is

62 Report No. 2003-P-00012

NYC-WTC_000145582