Image courtesy of NOAA
“The first indication I knew something was wrong was that by September 12 there was no evidence of or even consideration of organization,” says David Newman, an industrial hygienist with NYCOSH. Newman was consulting on environmental hazards at 9/11 from day one. “There was no health or safety plan at the site, and this is Safety 101.”
Asbestos was most likely in various construction materials used to build the World Trade Center, an EPA memo stated. It explained that short-term exposure to asbestos can cause respiratory, skin, or eye irritation. The information was dangerously incorrect.
“If our purpose was to save lives and avoid injury and illnesses, we did not have years, months, or even weeks to wait for corrective actions,” said former Occupational Safety and Health Administration chief John Henshaw in a recent House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing. OSHA played an advisory role during the WTC cleanup.
Inhalable asbestos particles are microscopic and completely unidentifiable without the aid of a microscope. Exposure to asbestos is dangerous in part because it does not cause obvious irritation; contamination manifests itself over the course of years and decades, not days. It’s an invisible, deadly, and patient toxin. The only effective protection against airborne asbestos is a special respirator.
“I was down there watching people working without respirators,” Newman says. “Others took off their respirators to eat. It was a surreal, ridiculous, unacceptable situation.”
Stringent protocols govern asbestos contamination cleanup. After a specialized training period, health exam, and certification, licensed technicians must wear industrial-grade respirators and asbestos-resistant suits. New York City has a history of properly addressing asbestos contamination. Back in 1989, a relatively small steam pipe explosion on Gramercy Park South sent 200 pounds of asbestos blowing onto neighboring buildings. As a precaution, the entire building was covered in protective plastic sheeting, and city environmental officials complained that the cleanup would require more than four weeks of painstaking procedures for outdoor decontamination alone. More than 200 area tenants were displaced for weeks following the accident.
The World Trade Center had been, by some accounts, the largest fireproofing project in the world, with possibly 400 to 1,000 tons of asbestos, which was released during the collapse. Bureaucrats aired their assurances to the world.
“The air is safe as far as we can tell, with respect to chemical and biological agents,” Giuliani pronounced two days after the attack.
On September 12, a regional EPA office volunteered to send 30 to 40 electron microscopes to Ground Zero to test bulk dust samples for the presence of asbestos fibers, according to EPA whistle-blower Cate Jenkins, yet the local EPA office declined the offer, opting for the less effective polarized light microscopy testing method instead. Jenkins had further alleged that regional office personnel were told by the local EPA office: “We don’t want you fucking cowboys here. The best thing they could do is reassign you to Alaska.”
Three days after 9/11, following questionable air sampling techniques, a spokesperson for the EPA said that levels of asbestos were either at low levels, negligible, or undetectable.
“I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that the air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink,” Whitman said one week after 9/11.
Under the gray, noxious air, trusting residents returned to their homes in Lower Manhattan, unsuspecting children returned to their schools, and hundreds of thousands of downtown workers trudged to their desks. In the following year, the EPA gave more than 50 public assurances concerning the toxic exposure. At least another 15 came from New York City officials.
The systemic failures began occurring almost immediately following the disaster, in part because of an unclear chain of command. In times of environmental crisis, a blueprint for a federal response, called the National Contingency Plan, entitles the EPA to oversee safety and cleanup efforts—but it does not obligate the EPA to do so. During 9/11, New York City initiated a lead role in the environmental crisis response, and as a result, the mayor’s leadership has been called into question.
“We didn’t have the authority to do that [health and safety] enforcement, but we communicated that to the people who did,” Whitman said in a 60 Minutes interview. “Really, the city was the primary responder.” Whitman’s office repeatedly declined an invitation to speak with DISCOVER.
