WTC Gonzalez log sheet, November 2001

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Three days after 9/11, city Department of Transportation officials hurriedly arranged environmental testing at the agency's headquarters at 40 Worth St. in lower Manhattan. Those tests, performed by an outside consultant, revealed major lead contamination in the building. Some tests showed lead levels 10 times higher than federal regulations allow for indoor dust, according to internal agency documents recently obtained by the Daily News. The test results were especially significant because the 20story office building that houses DOT is located 10 blocks north of Ground Zero, in an area that City Hall and the federal government reopened to hundreds of thousands of office workers a few days later - on Sept. 17. At the time, health officials kept insisting there was no threat to public health from the fires at Ground Zero. Early environmental tests, they said, showed no worrisome contamination from asbestos or other toxic substances that were released after the twin towers collapsed. The lead contamination at 40 Worth St. was a clear challenge to that official story. Who could be sure there was no similar contamination in scores of other nearby office buildings where people had returned to work? On the department's 10th floor, for example, where the office of Commissioner Iris Weinshall is located, a dust sample from a window near the elevator showed lead levels three times above federal safety standards. The contamination there, however, was never publicly revealed by city officials who eventually posted thousands of environmental test results on a Web site of the city Department of Environmental Protection. The agency quietly notified its employee union, District Council 37, about the problem and hurriedly ordered the building's landlord to fix the problem. "Extensive cleanup was done before the employees were allowed to return a few weeks later," said DOT spokeswoman Kay Sarian. "The city tried to give us some ridiculous reason that it [the lead contamination] was from before 9/11," said Lee Clarke, health and safety director for DC 37. Nearly five years later, it has become increasingly apparent that city officials simply hid from the public some of the worst results of their environmental testing in those early days. This column revealed Wednesday that some top city health officials were deeply worried about air quality in lower Manhattan and opposed efforts to open more buildings around Ground Zero but were overruled by City Hall.

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