Newsday article clipping on WTC air quality, Aug 2006

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

sufficient. "We knew that the air quality was less than ideal, but I was also repeatedly and regularly informed that the protection those employees had was sufficient to protect their health," he said in a deposition in the pending class-action suit.

But Ground Zero workers routinely flouted rules requiring the use of respirators. An OSHA summary spanning Sept. 11 to March shows that respirator use among construction workers rarely exceeded 45 percent and was often much lower. The rate among police officers and firefighters was only slightly better.

Safety inspectors who roamed the site consistently reported the failure to use respirators. "We have observed very inconsistent compliance with our recommendations," the EPA's Bruce Sprague warned in an Oct. 5 memo.

On Oct. 15, Stew Burkhammer, an official with Bechtel, the firm initially in charge of safety, complained to city safety official Robert Adams: "They [contractors] are either refusing to take corrective action or are giving our team excuses as to why we have no authority to tell them anything. Our team members are not used to taking abuse like this and are getting very discouraged."

In January and February 2002, the failure to use respirators remained a serious problem. On Jan. 3, for example, DDC official Bruce Rottner wrote that just 20 percent of workers were wearing their respirators.

"Throughout the entire site tonight and last night use of respiratory protective equipment. . . was terrible," Rottner wrote.

There were several reasons for the problems. The masks were difficult to wear. It was hard to breathe and hard to talk in them. And it was a lot to ask workers, on exhausting 12-hour shifts, to wear them at all times, according to memos at the time.

Though OSHA said it had trained thousands of workers, some Ground Zero workers claimed that they either never received respirators or did not receive adequate training in using them.

Several officials have acknowledged in depositions that there was no one person in charge of enforcing the safety guidelines. In hindsight, Sam Benson, a city OEM official, testified: "I certainly would have had more of an overhead team ... and to have a more disciplined process."

Early signs of problems

From the first week, officials had statistics that raised questions about the air quality. From the day of the attack through Nov. 20, more than 100 Ground Zero workers per week were treated for lung injuries, records show. In all, between Sept. 11 and Nov. 18, 983 Ground Zero workers reported lung injury. Another 200 workers complained of throat irritation.

In late September 2001, the two top medical officials in the Fire Department, David Prezant and Kerry Kelly, submitted a $6-million funding request to study and track firefighters and paramedics exposed to hazards at the site.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen backed the request, which was granted. He wrote: "Time is of the essence to ensure that these tests are completed quickly so that possible exposure to certain substances can still be measured."

In their proposal, Prezant and Kelly saw the study as urgent and necessary. "If this had been a private industrial accident, every worker on-site would be tested and evaluated," the doctors wrote.

The city DEP had test results taken between Sept. 12 and Sept. 29 that showed hazardous levels of asbestos up to seven blocks from Ground Zero in 17 of 87 tests, and readings that overloaded the sensors in 29 other cases because dust clogged the filters.

But not until Kupferman's Freedom of Information request in December 2001 to the state were those results made public, he said.

Separately, Cate Jenkins, an EPA scientist long critical of the 9/11 environmental testing, claimed that DEP altered or withheld the "overload" data when it posted the results on its Web site in 2002.

Asked about her claims, the city responded to Newsday Friday by noting the overload readings are a common occurrence in dusty conditions, making the test unusable but not indicating the presence of asbestos.

"The accumulated data from DEP, EPA, OSHA and other agencies showed no significant pattern of elevated asbestos levels," wrote Becker of the law department. 3

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