E-mails R. Avaltroni 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

"There has been no comprehensive testing of the air or dust in any of the SBE to 40,000 residential buildings, and they easily have 30,000 SBH tenants," said Sudhir Jain, president of the Lower Manhattan Tenants Coalition. "They need to go through each building, apartment by apartment, and test for mercury, lead, dioxins, asbestos, and everything else that was in the dust. The government needs to do whatever is necessary to clean it up."

The coalition has asked the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, to spend $15 million to test nearly 7, S5E apartments for contamination. But city, state and federal officials have not yet decided if they need to do more than advise residents on how to take care of themselves.

"We have no idea what the air quality is," said Nancy Rosing, 64, of Battery Park City. "We all had sore throats and headaches for a couple of months."

Rosing said she remained concerned about the dust from barges where debris is being dumped for removal, and that streets continued to be watered.

"When you go by there, your lungs just seem to know they shouldn't be breathing quite so deeply," she said. "When there's a drought and they keep watering the streets, then you know they know something we don't know. What's in the dust? They've had construction here for years and never watered down the streets."

Most city residents interviewed In the neighborhood last week, however, said they were no longer concerned about contaminated air.

"I think that it was really bad when they were saying it wasn't, but now the problem is gone," said Roger Newton, 40, who lives in SoHo.

The Sept. 11 destruction of the Twin Towers was an unprecedented environmental disaster, generating more than 3 billion pounds of broken glass, concrete dust, twisted steel and pulverized furnishings. The fires that burned for months at the site released dangerous amounts of the myriad compounds that make up such a massive development.

Since then, rescue workers, residents, government agencies and environmental groups have been debating and offering conflicting accounts of the relative safety of the air in the immediate area.

New York City's official position is that there is no danger of contaminated air, but It does not monitor dust or air In apartment buildings, many of which were heavily damaged in the aftershocks of the Twin Towers' collapse.

"We feel the air quality is no worse than it was Sept. 10," said David Longshore, a spokesman for the city's OfRce of Emergency Management. "When you look at

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