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

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

dust—in English and Spanish—untight have had a dramatic impact on the day laborers who were hired to clean up lower Manhattan office buildings without appropriate equipment and no training.”

“The absence of strong enforcement and leadership on the part of EPA, OSHA, PESH, the New York City Department of Health, and New York City Department of Envirotunental Protection resulted in unnecessary exposure of workers and community residents to toxic substances. We also believe that such action has set a bad precedent.”

“A driving force and priority in this crisis was to re-open the downtown area, especially Wall Street. Public health was not government’s main priority when the Mayor announced that Wall Street would be open the following Monday—only six days after the collapse. These decisions were made at the highest levels—^probably at the White House. Politics, not public health, was in command.”

On January 14, 2002, Andrew Schneider reported the following in the St. Louis Post­

Dispatch:

“Civilian scientists and physicians hired by unions, tenant groups, contractors and New York political leaders found just the opposite [of EPA assurances]. Taking hundreds of samples, many inside apartments, offices and condos, these experts used the newest electron microscope technology and fiber-counting protocols. They found far more asbestos fibers than did government investigators. These private experts - all regularly used by the government as consultants ~ foimd levels in the dwellings that alarmed many assessing the health risk faced by New Yorkers.

“These eminent asbestos researchers brought state-of-the-art methods to lower Manhattan and ... what they found with the new technology is dramatically different that what EPA and New York State reported,” said Cate Jenkins, a senior EPA chemist in the agency’s hazardous waste division.”

“For every asbestos fiber EPA detected, the new methods used by the outside experts found nine,” Jenkins said. “This is too important a difference to be ignored if you really care about the health of the public.”

Also in glaring contrast to the assurances that EPA gave to downtown New Yorkers, the agency

apparently abandoned its own New York offices when traces of asbestos were found there on

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