City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  2 Press briefing with Gov. George Pataki, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, and other elected officials.

  3CBS News transcripts, The Early Show, 13 September 2001, interview by Jane Clayson.

  4 Landrigan, Philip J., et al., “Health and Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Disaster,” Environmental Health Perspectives 112, no. 6 (May 2004): 731-739.

  5 Solecki, Mike, “What It Was Like to Be an On-Scene Coordinator at Ground Zero,” www.epa.gov/superfund/accomp/news/wtcstory.htm.

  6 Seelye, Katharine Q., “Whitman Quits as E.P.A. Chief,” The New York Times, 22 May 2003, p. 1, accessed at www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/politics/22WHIT.html?scp=1&sq=.

  7 “EPA Response to September 11, Region 2,” available at www.epa.gov/wtc/stories/yearreview.htm.

  8 Suskind, Ron, The Price of Loyalty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

  9 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General, “EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Challenges, Successes, and Areas for Improvement,” 21 August 2003: 17.

  10Ibid., p. 16.

  11Ibid.

  12Ibid., p. 42.

  13 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General, “Survey of Air Quality Information Related to the World Trade Center Collapse” (Report No. 2003-P-00014), 26 September 2003.

  Part II: Disease

  3. Significant chaos

  As the air began to clear over Lower Manhattan that first morning, and the heaviest dust from the choking plumes started to lift, weak September sunlight revealed the terrorists’ shocking achievement: a ten-story pile of twisted steel and blasted concrete festering like a tumor on the heart of America’s most critical financial district. Hopelessly entangled and incredibly complex, it was like nothing that had even been seen outside of a war zone. This is the oldest part of the city, and four centuries of commerce and growth had been wiped out—right down to the primordial bedrock. It is difficult to imagine any municipal government being in a position to take charge in such a chaotic moment. History has shown time and again how governments can be practically paralyzed by disaster. After the 1985 earthquake that devastated Mexico City, local officials were so slow to act, and their tepid response—eventually taken over and run insensitively by the federal government—was so inept that residents quickly concluded that they were on their own. They then began to organize neighborhood action groups to provide emergency shelter, food, and water. And from those self-help groups sprouted Mexico’s fledgling democracy movement. Still, all that civic spirit wasn’t enough to bring the city back. Buildings that had been flattened in the quake—and buried occupants inside the ruined structures—festered untouched for years.

  New York City’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attack began with more blind pragmatism than plan, as Giuliani’s wandering that morning showed. But the effort was not held back by any lack of confidence about the city’s ability to handle whatever it confronted. From the very first moments, even as the mayor and his top police officials wandered through the dusty streets searching for a place to set up emergency operations, the legion of New York’s municipal bureaucrats—hardened from years of experience in running the devilishly complex city, with all its different groups and competing interests, while handling unique emergencies nearly every day—responded in a practiced, matter-of-fact way to the biggest disaster any of them had seen.

  What they had in their favor was the accumulated experience of keeping New York City going, and that, in itself, represented a formidable degree of expertise. The ordinary functions of a municipal government had mutated in New York so that the ordinary became exceptional. The most mundane became singular. The city’s building code must be comprehensive enough to cover the construction of backyard decks as well as the exigencies of erecting some of the world’s tallest buildings; the bedrock of Manhattan is tunneled with the country’s most extensive underground transportation system along with the city’s telecommunications network—the busiest and most complex in the country. Even such simple municipal duties as providing water are colossal undertakings. The deep underground tunnels for the city’s water works had to be drilled through the Manhattan schist bedrock on such a scale that they carried more than a billion gallons of fresh drinking water a day from as far as 120 miles away.

  On September 11, those who were in charge of the ordinary had to respond to the unthinkable. One of the men who would eventually play a key role in the recovery operations was Michael Burton, executive deputy commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, a low-profile city agency that had responsibility for all municipal construction projects except for schools and sewage treatment plants. His day began like any other. Burton was attending a regularly scheduled meeting at City Hall in downtown Manhattan when the first plane struck a few blocks away.1 A deputy mayor, Tony Coles, initially took it in stride, recalling, as many New Yorkers did, the black-and-white photos of a B-25 bomber that had crashed into the Empire State Building in a thick fog in 1945. As a precaution, City Hall was evacuated and Coles asked Burton to look for the Office of Emergency Management’s command bus, hoping to find Mayor Giuliani there. With phone lines almost immediately overloaded, Burton walked four or five blocks south on Broadway, hoping to find the bus. But no such luck. Burton was thinking ahead, knowing that, with or without the command bus, once the fire department had put out the blaze, there might still be broken glass and other debris falling from the World Trade Center, threatening pedestrians. Burton reached out to the construction companies he knew and arranged to have one of the big scaffolding contractors load their trucks and stand by, ready to assemble protective coverings over the trade center plaza and on nearby sidewalks so passersby wouldn’t get hurt. So far, it was just another day in the big apple.

  Then the second plane hit the South Tower, and 57 minutes later that building came down. Burton’s boss, Kenneth Holden, was well aware that the trade center site was owned by the Port Authority, which still kept its executive offices there.2 Holden tried to get through to someone at the agency, but the phones were dead. With the legal owner out of pocket and the lessee of the building, developer Larry Silverstein (who had just taken out a long-term lease on the huge complex a few weeks earlier), not in a position to handle what needed to be done next, Holden took it upon his own department, which had the best contacts with the private construction industry, to step in. The badly hurt fire department—which at that time knew only that it had lost its top commanders and an unbearable number of firefighters—needed help moving the steel and concrete to rescue survivors. Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington had tried to find someone with equipment and expertise but struck out.

  Holden, and particularly Burton, had better luck. In a few hours, they had sent out police vans to pick up the executives of four construction companies and rush them to ground zero. Three were very big contractors that regularly worked on the city’s most complex projects, usually employing dozens of smaller subcontractors and hundreds of workers. The fourth was a local construction company that already had some heavy equipment nearby because it was just finishing a long-term project on the West Side Highway. The trade center site was hastily divided into quadrants, and each company took control of a section in an initial attempt to bring order to ground zero.

  When the contractors joined the city officials at what had hours before been the World Trade Center, they saw for themselves the overwhelming scale of the calamity. Fires raged, the air was still opaque with dust, and firefighters and cops crawled over portions of the pile, looking as small as ants. “For the first week, and probably more than the first week, there was significant chaos,” Burton said later. Indeed, the chaos generated by the cataclysm in Lower Manhattan, along with the city’s robust though admittedly imperfect response, would become critical factors in what transpired later. For despite the city’s heroic efforts, the actions taken in the early days established a pattern of unintended consequences, missed opportunities, crossed signal
s, and lack of coordination that would undermine later attempts to set things right.

  In the confusion of those early hours, other city agencies moved just as quickly as Burton’s own department. The city’s veteran chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, rushed down to the trade center within minutes of the first plane hitting the north tower. He and one of his staff investigators, Diane Crisci, were on the West Side Highway, scouting places to set up a temporary morgue, when the South Tower came crashing down. Hirsch was cut and bruised and had sprained an ankle. Crisci’s leg was broken. The air had turned so dark that Hirsch was convinced he had been buried by debris, and rumors spread that he had been killed. After a few minutes, he shook off the debris. When the air started to clear, he and Crisci made their way toward an unusual light. As they drew nearer the light, they felt heat and realized the light was actually a burning car. They later stumbled upon an emergency medical services team that took care of them. Another rumor spread that Hirsch had sewn together a gash on his own arm, but that also turned out to be false. He was treated at the New York University Hospital and then walked next door to the medical examiner’s office, where he prepared for what he knew would be the grim task ahead.

  Kelly McKinney, the city health department’s associate commissioner for environmental health, was just coming out of the #1 subway at Chambers Street and West Broadway that morning and heading to work when he ran into a group of people pointing in the air.3 He turned and saw the jagged gash where American Airlines Flight 11, which had left Boston’s Logan Airport bound for California, had ripped through the North Tower a few minutes earlier. He stood at the corner trying to figure out what had happened. Nobody there knew any more than he did. He then walked several blocks to the health department offices on Worth Street and stopped to talk to members of his staff. As they pieced together their own experiences that morning, the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, smashed through the South Tower in a ball of flame. McKinney rushed everyone into the building and put them to work.

  “The main things we did that morning were to put up a 24-hour operation and begin to put a surveillance system into place to try to figure out what health issues were going to transpire,” McKinney later recalled. “We weren’t down there, but we knew there was dust.” Before that first day ended, McKinney and the department had issued a self-evident advisory recommending that any workers on the pile wear steel-capped boots, hard hats, protective goggles, and an N95 white paper dust mask to protect them from the large dust particles suspended in the air.

  The next morning, some of city government’s most powerful officials squeezed themselves into grade school desks at Public School/Intermediate School 89 in Lower Manhattan as they tried to figure out the best way to proceed. McKinney had some important information to share. He had met separately with representatives of Consolidated Edison, the big New York utility that had lost two gigantic substations in the base of Number 7 World Trade Center when that building, damaged by fire and debris from the twin towers across the street, had fallen down. The Con Ed workers showed McKinney the results of some early environmental testing that indicated there could be asbestos in the air. Con Ed had a troubled relationship with asbestos and was exceptionally careful about disclosing possible contamination. The company had suffered a blow to its reputation in 1989 when steam pipes near Gramercy Park exploded, killing three people and sending mud and asbestos flying into the air. It was later revealed that Con Ed had withheld information about the presence of asbestos for three days, even as residents of the neighborhood returned to their homes. This time, Con Ed officials were quick to share data with the city. A company employee had walked around ground zero on September 11 wearing a personal air monitor that had picked up a small number of samples with slightly elevated asbestos levels, but not enough to incite panic. Still, McKinney felt it should be taken into account.

  “The one thing we thought about in our minds was that there were hundreds and maybe thousands of people that were still trapped in the rubble,” he recalled. “So when I saw the data, I said to myself, does this mean we have to recommend a P100 respirator?” With its tight-fitting straps and changeable filter cartridges, the P100 respirator offered protection against asbestos and many other contaminants that the N95 masks McKinney had recommended did not. If he decided to upgrade his recommendation, should he make it an official advisory or recommend that the health commissioner issue a formal order, which carried far more weight? “Does that mean that I go to the incident commander at ground zero and tell him to pull his firefighters off and tell him to pull the construction people off until we can fit them with half-face dual cartridge respirators?” he wondered.

  Slowing down the rescue operation at that moment was unthinkable. So McKinney walked to the office of the city’s purchasing agent and ordered 10,000 P100 respirators to be delivered to the site as quickly as possible. He did not recommend shutting down the site or holding up operations until every worker was properly fitted with a mask and given detailed instructions on how to use it. The masks would be made available, and workers would be advised—and, in some instances, ordered—to wear them. It was a faint sense of security, certainly not the kind of assurance that McKinney or any other health official would have wanted in an ideal world.

  The Con Ed data had shown a slight elevation in asbestos fibers, but McKinney, more than most, was aware that a densely packed city like New York is loaded with potential sources of contaminants like asbestos and lead. Had the data come back with a definitive answer about significantly elevated levels of asbestos in the air, he would have had all the evidence he needed to tell the incident commanders what was required. McKinney knew a lot about how dangerous asbestos could be. Before joining the health department, he had worked as an environmental engineer for the Port Authority, designing asbestos-abatement and lead-abatement projects at the agency’s airports and terminals and the trade center itself.

  McKinney needed more data, but the department’s ability to take samples was severely limited. He formally asked the EPA to conduct comprehensive testing for asbestos, metals, PCBs, and volatile organic compounds, but he didn’t know how long the federal agency would take to come up with answers. Then he discovered something about the catastrophe unfolding around him. He could petition just about anyone in city government for just about anything he needed and expect to receive it right away. He could even ignore the city’s normally rigid requisitioning procedures. McKinney called a friend from the New York City School Construction Authority, where he once worked, and requisitioned five environmental consultants from the authority’s preapproved list. Each consulting company sent three technicians with personal air monitors to take samples. McKinney also talked fire department officials into allowing him to put personal air-monitoring equipment on 15 fire department battalion chiefs.

  By September 13, the EPA was beginning to report its data, which coincided with the early Con Ed information. But McKinney was dismayed that the EPA, with all its resources, had not set up the comprehensive network of sampling stations he had asked for and was not analyzing the samples for other contaminants. “[The] EPA was not noticeably quick in implementing any of the decisions that we had come to in terms of what samples needed to be taken,” McKinney recalled.

  As that first week ended, samples began to show higher asbestos levels in some locations away from the debris pile. This prodded McKinney to change the department’s advisory yet again. He upgraded his safety recommendation to P100 OVAG respirators, a more protective mask with cartridges that could block out organic vapors and acid gases, along with the asbestos fibers and other contaminants that a regular P100 could block. The health department advised everyone who was working on the pile and within a 50-foot radius around the pile to wear the respirators and to change the filter cartridges regularly. McKinney tried to keep the message simple because he believed that was the only way to make it effective. He feared that trying to draw too fine of a line about where and when the ma
sks should be used would muffle the message and cause confusion, without leading to compliance. “If we were going to be anywhere near effective with communications,” he remarked, “we had to make the message extremely simple.”

  Even without Giuliani’s emergency command center, the city’s agencies continued to step up to the plate. Samuel Benson, Director of Health and Medical Planning and Preparedness at the Office of Emergency Management, had been in the 7 World Trade Center bunker when the first plane hit.4 He and others who were on duty early that morning began to activate the city’s emergency plan. Benson notified the Greater New York Hospital Association and the state Emergency Management Office before being evacuated from the bunker at around 9:30. He lingered in the building’s lobby for half an hour, but when the first tower came down, he and other workers were forced out. They later regrouped, this time in the street. When the second tower fell, Benson took shelter in a restaurant on West Broadway. He found a working telephone inside and called the United States Public Health Service. He spoke to the director of the Office of Emergency Response, apprising him of what was unfolding on the ground in New York. Two hours later, after he had joined the rest of the emergency management team at the police academy, Benson called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and requested deployment of the national pharmaceutical stockpile, preparing for the worst. City health department officials were worried that the planes might have carried a secret nuclear device that could spread deadly radioactivity around the area. They also checked for blood-borne pathogens and other potential bioterrorism agents, and were quickly able to determine with a degree of certainty that neither posed a threat. Still, the department had to check.

  The city agencies were moving with remarkable speed, but it was the uniformed services—police, firefighter, and emergency medical teams—that were on the front line. The police department secured the perimeter of the site and used all its officers to protect the rest of the city from further attack. A few detectives were sent out to secure private ice skating rinks that could be used as makeshift morgues for the large number of bodies that were expected to be recovered. Uniformed volunteers from all over the country backed up the city’s own forces. Armed National Guard troops patrolled the streets around ground zero, and an army of federal agencies soon began to arrive.