EPA response letter with respirator policy revisions, August 2003

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the revised excerpts from the Draft Evaluation Report: EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Lessons Learned, Assignment No. 2002-0000702. This response is on behalf of New York City (“the City”) to the Draft Evaluation Report. Also, the City requests that you consider the comments forwarded to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by letter dated July 8, 2003 concerning the initial excerpts that the EPA forwarded to the City, which are attached hereto, in addition to the comments contained herein.

Before commenting on the excerpts, which were forwarded to the City, the City must note that although it has requested that it be provided the entire draft report, so that it would be better able to address the comments in the draft report concerning the City, only excerpts were provided to the City. Without access to the entire draft report to place comments concerning the City into context, the City is disadvantaged in providing comments to the excerpts. However, comments in the excerpts concerning the City compel a response by the City and the City hereby responds to the best of its ability. The following comments are submitted on behalf of the City.

1. The City believes that the third sentence in the first paragraph on page 1 of the revised draft report is misleading. The sentence implies that the EPA assumed a lead role in responding to indoor environmental concerns because of criticism of the City. It implies furthermore that criticism of the City was warranted. The evidence does not support a conclusion that the EPA took a lead role with respect to this issue solely because of criticism of the City. There were a number of factors present at this time which probably influenced any EPA decision to take a lead role in addressing environmental concerns, including criticism of the EPA and the initial availability of federal funds at that time to address this issue. More importantly there is no evidence available to support that any criticism of the City with respect to indoor environmental concerns was warranted. Also, the sentence, refers to EPA initiating a multi-agency task force at that time. This implies that this was the first time that federal, state and City agencies worked together to address this issue. The documents supplied by the City show that federal, state and City agencies worked together from September 12, 2001 to address the environmental issues, including indoor environmental concerns. We recommend that the sentence be revised to read, “EPA began to assume a lead role in February 2002, when the Agency chaired a multi-agency task force to continue to address concerns about the indoor environment.”

2. The City has similar comments with respect to the paragraph labeled “Indoor Contamination Response” on page 1. This comment refers to concerns raised by public and elected officials and specific criticism of the City. Again including this criticism appears to imply that the criticism was warranted, particularly since the City’s position is not presented. The City notes that in the same paragraph, where criticism of the EPA is set forth, the EPA’s position is presented in rebuttal to the criticism. The City believes that the evidence does not support the criticism. For example, criticism concerning delegating testing and remediation efforts to building owners and residents is unwarranted. The City did not delegate this responsibility to owners and residents. The owners and residents always had this responsibility, it was never the City’s responsibility to do this and consequently the could not delegate what it did not have. Similarly, there is no evidence to support that the City did not enforce proper procedures for cleaning asbestos where it had the enforcement authority and that the City gave improper advice to the public on testing and cleaning procedures. As noted before, the EPA adopted the City’s advice to its citizens. Moreover, including these criticisms implies that there

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