DEP fax header with article title, June 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

JAN-09-2002 10:16 NYC DOH LASU 212 676 6159 P.05/06

safe, he said: “A week after this event it would have been very hard to make conclusive statements about air quality in either direction.” Kathryn Freed, a City Council member until her term ended Dec. 31, is still worried. She lives a few blocks from the World Trade Center site and has suffered from bronchitis and nosebleeds. "They should be measuring us They should be monitoring us," she said. "There's like a disconnect between what's actually happening here and what they're saying." Problems at a Nearby School Stuyvesant High School, one of the city's most prestigious public schools, reopened to students on Oct. 9. Five blocks north of the World Trade Center site, it is next to the pier where rubble from ground zero is loaded onto barges to be taken to the Staten Island landfill. From the start students and teachers complained of eye and respiratory problems. When the Department of Health announced that students could report their illnesses for a study, teenagers waited in line for more than an hour outside the nurse's office. Sophomore Georgia Faust said her eyes became infected, "watering so much it would feel like you're peeling onions." Several students needed inhalers to rid themselves of sinus infections. The city's Board of Education insists the site is safe, and that its air quality is monitored each day. And special floor mats have been installed at the entryways to prevent students from tracking in dust. "There's something in the air and that's dust,” said spokeswoman Catie Marshall. "But it's not the kind of thing that's going to have a long-term effect."

When Brooklyn firefighter Palmer Doyle arrived at the World Trade Center after the second tower collapsed, there was one respirator for 47 firefighters. He worked almost a month of 12-hour shifts wearing a flimsy paper mask. Later in October, his hoarseness, bronchitis and a hacking cough kept him off the job for 16 days. "Guys are a little scared. They're nervous," he said. "We know what environment we worked in and it wasn't healthy." The Uniformed Firefighters Association estimates that about one-third of its 9,000 members suffer from the "World Trade Center cough." Tom Manley has it too; he's a union chief who spent countless hours at ground zero consoling relatives and digging for victims. He carries an inhaler and cough medicine "You wake up in the morning with a heavy cough,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/Al 1173-2002Jan7.html 01/08/2002

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