City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  McVay Hughes has a tall woman’s lanky grace, accented by bright eyes, a mellow voice, and a highly structured practical mind. At a time when few women made their careers in technical fields, she had studied hydro-geologic engineering at Princeton, where she had met her future husband, Thomas, an English major. Her relationship with the trade center complex went back to her first job after graduation in 1982 with ICOS, an Italian company that had designed and built the famous slurry wall that lined the cavernous basement of the trade center and kept the murky waters of the Hudson River at bay. After working in engineering for several years, she returned to school, this time for an M.A. from the Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. That was followed by a stint in New York finance, which convinced her that the world of Wall Street was not for her, either. Something important was missing. At Princeton, she had been schooled in the idea of “service to the nation,” and her own family history made service an integral part of a complete life. Her father, Scott McVay, was the influential president of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation in New Jersey and was known for his dedication to community and the arts.

  When Catherine McVay married Tom Hughes in 1987, she moved into the funky 14th-story loft he had purchased on Broadway a few years earlier. One day, returning from the investment house where she worked, McVay Hughes, dressed in a business suit, decided to stop in at the downtown offices of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), an advocacy organization founded by Ralph Nader, who had been a classmate of her father’s at Princeton in the 1950s. She didn’t realize how out of place her business attire would look among the jeans and sneakers that were the dress code at the nonprofit group’s office. Regardless, she was interested in what they were doing and wondered if there was some way she could help. With her background in business and engineering, she was well suited to take over the group’s fuel oil purchase program, a cooperative effort to buy discounted home heating oil and pass along the savings to needy families. When the job was formally offered, she took it. Later she helped run NYPIRG’s lead abatement program, eventually coauthoring a residents’ guide called “Get the Lead Out.” When she found out that asthma among city kids was a growing health concern, she started Asthmamoms.com, a web site that provided information and guidance to families dealing with asthma.

  After her son Philip was born in 1991, and then Matthew in 1995, the downtown Manhattan community where the Hughes family lived became even more important to her. In 1997, McVay Hughes joined Community Board 1, the local liaison between downtown residents and city government. In New York City, community boards make decisions about liquor licenses, street fairs, and other local issues that, in the hothouse environment of Manhattan, can quickly become quite heated. McVay Hughes’s dedication to her children was well known when it came to the community amenities that the financial district lacked. She believed that Wall Street could be the kind of 24/7 neighborhood where it was possible to put down deep roots and raise a family. Her one exception was education. She and Tom sent the boys to the Packer Collegiate Institute, a private school in Brooklyn with a 1-acre garden where they could get dirt under their fingernails.

  On the morning the towers were attacked, McVay Hughes was in Brooklyn. She had taken the subway with her boys, then 9 and 5, and dropped them off at Packer Collegiate. But she had stayed to attend a session with the school’s music teacher, to find out which instruments were available for students to study. To take advantage of a beautiful September morning at the beginning of the school year, she’d planned to walk back home, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. She had on her sneakers, and in her fanny pack she carried her driver’s license and an American Express credit card. She did not have a cellphone then.

  McVay Hughes had just started on her way when she heard that a plane had hit the trade center. She thought it surely was a small private plane that had gone off course. She couldn’t see the towers and couldn’t call anyone to find out what had happened, so she and a few friends continued their stroll. When they got to the bridge, a swarm of people came toward them from Manhattan. As the true scope of the disaster became clear, McVay Hughes immediately turned back toward the school to pick up the boys. She gathered them up and used a school phone to make sure that Tom, who worked at 99 Church Street, just a few blocks from the trade center, was safe. Then her practical side kicked in. She withdrew money from the bank and went to the hardware store to buy N95 dust masks. She made the boys wear the masks as she took them to the Brooklyn promenade overlooking New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan. They stood there in the blizzard of paper and ash that was raining down from the towers and gazed out toward their home. “I want you to see what’s going on,” she told them.1 Even if they didn’t quite understand what had happened, she wanted them to have some idea why they wouldn’t be going home for a while.

  The boys wouldn’t sleep in their own beds for more than four months.

  Although it wasn’t damaged when the trade center fell, their building had been invaded by dust. The National Guard had evacuated all residents, but by breaking through the glass front doors, they opened a way for the dust to infiltrate the lobby and be tracked upstairs. As president of the building, Tom Hughes later had to negotiate for the common areas of the building to be professionally cleaned. Cleaning inside each apartment was left to the individual owners. Although McVay Hughes had shut the old copper-framed windows in her apartment when she had left that morning, they were far from air tight. A thick layer of grayish dust had seeped in and settled over everything. Luckily, the building’s superintendent had acted quickly to shut down the central ventilation system, preventing even more dust from being blown into every apartment and all the common areas. Still, whatever dust had seeped in made the apartments unlivable.

  Her training and professional experience, her work with lead paint and diesel fumes and asthma, and all that she had learned and put into practice until then led McVay Hughes to believe that the collapse had contaminated her home and her neighborhood. She was puzzled when Christie Whitman and Mayor Giuliani encouraged residents to return home and get on with their lives. The dust she saw everywhere, the acrid smells and throat-burning smoke, the news she read in the tabloids, just didn’t correspond to what she heard the officials saying. She was urged to register with FEMA, and about a month after the attack, she did. An inspector from the agency came to check the conditions in the apartment. It already had been professionally cleaned, but when the inspector saw the cloth-covered white sofa in the living room, he smacked it hard. Dust billowed up. There’s only way to be safe, he told her. Get rid of the sofa. It was fairly new, and she thought that dumping it would be wasteful. But when she saw that dust, she decided it had to go. She threw out other upholstered furniture, fabric curtains, and mattresses. All of the boys’ stuffed animals went out, too, except for three special ones, which she put through the washing machine several times. She recalled what the FEMA inspector had told her when he saw the apartment. He had urged her to think twice before moving back. “He said, ‘Ma’am, I used to be a firefighter down South. This is what you call a toxic fire,’” she said. He told her that being there would be unhealthy for everyone, but especially the boys. “If you have kids you should not return until the fires are out.”

  She had filed a disaster claim with FEMA for one air purifier. She ran it constantly and was surprised to find that the filter that was supposed to last six months became so clogged in two weeks that it needed to be replaced. That’s when she decided to buy several more units, along with the filters to go with them.

  It took a long while for McVay Hughes to be satisfied that the area was safe enough for her children to return. She had read Juan Gonzalez’s columns, and she knew that Joel Kupferman’s tests for asbestos had come back positive. As a member of the Lower Manhattan community board, she pressured City Hall to acknowledge that the contaminated air around ground zero endangered local residents and that many of them needed professional help clean
ing up their apartments. One month after the collapse, she attended the first public meeting on health concerns. Others on the community board tried to discourage her from speaking out about the hazardous conditions. It would be unpatriotic to even bring up such things while the city was hurting, they said, and so many people had so much more to worry about. But she insisted.

  Her building had a good insurance policy that paid for a top-to-bottom professional cleaning. Her own insurance replaced furniture and clothing that had to be discarded. But many other downtown residents didn’t have such good coverage and couldn’t afford to pay for the work themselves. Some lived in buildings whose landlords refused to cooperate, fearing that authorizing a cleanup would leave them legally liable if something went wrong. Those residents had turned to the EPA for help, but the agency told them it had no legal responsibility for indoor spaces. Nonetheless, in the days just after the attacks, the agency had come to understand the severity of the indoor contamination. After federal agents tracked dust into the lobby of its own building, just a few blocks up Broadway from McVay Hughes, the EPA undertook an extensive decontamination of its space.

  A discussion of what needed to be done in Lower Manhattan had just gotten underway when New York City notified the EPA that it intended to handle the job itself. But how it was going to do so wasn’t clear. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection claimed it had jurisdiction only over building exteriors. After complaints from residents about dust on building facades, the department started a large-scale effort to wash them. Finally, the city’s Department of Health (under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, it was renamed the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) acknowledged that the potential presence of contaminants inside residences constituted a public health hazard that needed to be addressed. But the way it responded only added to the confusion and increased the fear.

  The city health department issued step-by-step guidelines for decontaminating apartments. It distributed pamphlets and posted notices on its website advising residents to use vacuum cleaners, mops, and wet rags for the job. The instructions were not very sophisticated, and they may well have violated city laws that require licensed asbestos removers to handle asbestos abatement. For years afterward, critics—led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat whose district covers most of Lower Manhattan, including ground zero—ridiculed the city for suggesting that residents facing hazardous contamination arm themselves with mops and wet rags.

  The critics also raised alarms about the way the city reopened offices, businesses, and schools after the attacks. For some, the city’s handling of the schools was a microcosm of the government response to the whole disaster and was marked just as strongly by lack of information, mistrust, and angry confrontation.

  All New York City schools were closed on September 11. Seven in Lower Manhattan, which served more than 6,000 children, remained closed for weeks or months afterward. The classrooms stayed empty despite Giuliani’s immediate response to the catastrophe, which was to ask the schools’ chancellor, Harold O. Levy, to reopen them the following day to prove that the city was unbowed. But just as President Bush’s advisers had warned him that reopening Wall Street too soon would be a disaster, Levy told Giuliani that the schools should not be reopened until they were thoroughly cleaned and proven safe. Students of the seven schools closest to ground zero were encouraged to attend classes in other schools until their own buildings were decontaminated. Some schools did not reopen until February 2002.

  The biggest of those schools, with more than 3,000 students, was Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s most selective. Almost as soon as the students had fled on the morning of September 11, Stuyvesant had been taken over by the city’s Office of Emergency Management, which held meetings there. The city used a nearby dock to load trade center debris onto barges bound for the reopened Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Dump trucks loaded with twisted steel and pulverized concrete rumbled past the school 24 hours a day.

  By October 9, under intense pressure to restore normalcy to New York, the emergency management office was ready to hand back control of Stuyvesant to the board of education. Levy went out of his way to prove that the building had been cleaned adequately and was safe. He told parents that air monitors had not found any significant amount of asbestos or other hazardous material, and he vowed that testing would continue for the rest of the year or longer. But soon after they returned to their desks, students complained of headaches, persistent coughing, and other symptoms of respiratory distress. After more testing, officials determined that the students actually weren’t getting enough air. By keeping the school’s windows closed and shutting air intakes to prevent the ground zero dust from recontaminating the school, they had inadvertently choked off the building’s supply of fresh air. Carbon dioxide built up, causing headaches and other problems. The school principal, Stanley Teitel, reported that when the Board of Education sent a nurse to check on conditions, 57 students and 31 teachers went to see her. The Stuyvesant parents’ association, however, said far more students than that felt ill, but the line to see the nurse grew so long that many got tired of waiting and left before being examined.2

  The mistrust that had overshadowed the city’s relationship with the responders had spread to the schools. Many Stuyvesant parents were themselves power players in New York City—finance executives, media managers, people who understood how to rally support for their cause. They demanded more rigorous testing and cleanup before they would allow their children to return, and they pressed the Board of Education for more resources. The city insisted that the schools were safe but nonetheless complied with requests for additional cleaning. Parents in some schools hired their own consultants and, later, their own lawyers. One group of parents tried to get a court injunction against the board. They resented being forced to choose between keeping their kids out of the reopened school (and, therefore, isolating them) or sending them into buildings that they felt could cause cancer in some of them decades into the future. Stuyvesant parents hired Richard Ben-Veniste, the Watergate lawyer, to represent them before the board. By challenging the board, the parents in some schools were able to delay their children’s return by at least a month. Stuyvesant parents had to settle for closing the school in mid-July 2002 for a comprehensive six-week cleanup.

  Despite the precautions and several surveys indicating that the majority of parents felt the city had done all it could, some students came down with serious illnesses, including Hodgkin’s disease, that were blamed on the dust although there was no scientific proof of any link. Still, worried parents continued to demand more information about what was happening to their children. Few satisfactory answers came.

  Nor were residents satisfied that their condos and co-ops had been made safe. Those with the means to have their own buildings cleaned and tested were horrified to find that even after the visible dust was gone, their apartments still were contaminated because the dust had gone under beds, behind bookcases, and in the louvers of air vents. “Suddenly, the idea of dust bunnies under the bed had a whole new meaning,” McVay Hughes recalled. Residents took their findings to Sen. Hillary Clinton and other officials, who demanded the EPA do something.

  Clinton understood that she was facing an uncooperative Republican administration that seemed to consider lingering problems at ground zero a rebuke of its claim that the terrorists would not win. Recognition of disease, or persistent danger, would tarnish the administration’s success in showing the terrorists how resilient the city, and the country, could be. By ignoring anything that was contrary, the administration was holding up its own “Mission Accomplished” sign at ground zero.

  As frightened residents grew increasingly concerned about the extent of the contamination they were left to clean, they found Senator Clinton to be a willing listener. Since taking office early in 2001, following a campaign in which she was called a carpetbagger, she hadn’t strongly connected with any New York issue. This was different. She had made h
er way to ground zero soon after the attacks and quickly immersed herself in the fight to win billions for New York’s reconstruction. She listened to the health concerns of the unions and others who represented responders working on the pile, and she worked hard to get them adequate medical attention. In a political sense, ground zero also meant that she could go toe to toe with the Bush White House and the Republican establishment she had been fighting for so long. She had walked the tattered streets of ground zero with her one-time and potential future rival, Mayor Giuliani. Clinton sometimes wore a dust mask and later said she had been certain from the beginning that the smoke and dust wasn’t good for anyone. As fears about the effects of the dust mounted, she became more involved and seemed to realize that she had found an effective way to defy the Bush administration; to stand apart from the Republicans who were running the city, state, and federal governments; and to begin to build a base for an eventual run for the Democratic nomination for president. In ground zero health, she would have a perfect foil to Giuliani’s claim to be America’s mayor. Contaminated schools, poisoned offices, and apartments where babies crawled along carpets that could be laced with asbestos fibers all would counter Giuliani’s claims about securing the city’s future the way no one else could.