Panel agenda for Air Quality After 9/11 conference, March 2004

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

The article also contains the following statement relative to the reoccupation of Lower

Manhattan:

“Hugh Kaufrnan, formerly of the EPA’s ombudsman’s office, says: ‘All the experienced people in the agency knew immediately it was a disaster and would need massive remediation... But decisions on how to approach it were made from the White House down, rather than from the scientists on the ground up. The message was to get downtown up and running as soon as possible and worry about the rest later.’”

A similar opinion was written by Joel Shufro (Executive Director of the New York Committee

for Occupational Safety and Health), in December 2002, in the American Journal of Industrial

Medicine (AJOIM). Mr. Shufro wrote:

“Rather than use their position as a bully pulpit to provide the public with information they could use to make informed decisions, the agencies saw their role as reassuring the public or said little. From the outset, government agencies, including EPA, OSHA, PESH and the New York City Department of Health, made reassuring statements about the safety of the environment without adequate data. These statements, as one official bluntly told me off the record, were designed to ‘reduce hysteria,’ they were designed for ‘crowd control.’ Although some agency staff tried their best to qualify, clarify and disavow the statements of their agency heads, the agencies themselves never retracted their initial reassuring statements. The discrepancy between these official statements and the illnesses experienced by workers and community residents created a serious credibility gap that has not been closed—and in our estimation has bred contempt and cynicism, if not derision, among the public and in important segments of the public health communities.”

“The EPA, OSHA, and PESH now presume that the dust released by the collapse of the Twin Towers included asbestos-containing material. However, it was not until early February that OSHA, for example, made this presumption public and then only in a letter responding to an inquiry from the Laborers International Union of North America. There was no public warning and the agency took no steps to publicize this critical information. Why didn’t OSHA, EPA or the New York City Department of Health hold a press conference and put out best practice protocols for cleaning up offices that would, at a minimum, give office workers and residents a standard to which they could have held their employers? A public aimoimcement about the asbestos-containing character of the

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