City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  For five months following the attack on the towers, the EPA did not test indoor air anywhere in Lower Manhattan, insisting that it was the city’s responsibility, a position that elected officials and local residents disputed. They cited various federal directives that seemed to make clear that in the response to such an attack, the EPA, with its expertise, was empowered to take the lead in handling contamination, whether outdoors or inside. Soon after the attacks, local elected officials—including Rep. Nadler, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. Charles Schumer—formed a task force and demanded answers about the hazards facing residents, students, and downtown workers. Within days of their first meeting, the officials ordered an independent assessment of contamination in downtown residences. When the results came back in mid-October, they showed cause for alarm. Concentrations of asbestos found in dust samples and in the air within apartments were significantly elevated. Any movement—even someone plopping onto a sofa—would propel the thin fibers back into the air. Analysts issued a bleak warning, urging that, unless proven otherwise by testing, “all dust should be assumed to be asbestos-containing,”3 and that removal should be done only by trained professionals. At a city council hearing a few weeks later, Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai testified that children’s exposure to trade center dust should be minimized. He urged that a registry of children potentially exposed to the dust be created, to monitor their health and pick up potentially harmful trends as quickly as science permitted.

  As revelations about the apparent disparity between the EPA’s assurances and the actual results of tests became known, residents took their complaints to the EPA’s national ombudsman, Robert Martin (a member of the Makah Indian Nation, he wore a business suit but kept his long hair in a ponytail). Early in 2002, Martin held public hearings into the EPA’s conduct. At the hearings, the agency was sharply criticized for turning its back on residents and passing the buck to the city, which clearly wasn’t capable of testing and cleaning the interiors of hundreds of buildings. The city’s environmental protection commissioner at the time, Joel A. Miele, admitted as much, saying his department was basically a “water and sewer agency,” without either the expertise or the equipment to handle a massive cleanup. Despite the EPA’s assurances that the air was safe, warnings had been issued the day after the attacks in a memo to the EPA by Dr. Edwin M. Kilbourne, associate administrator of the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. When the White House asked for a fact sheet on asbestos for the public, Kilbourne wrote to the director of biopreparedness and response at the Centers for Disease Control, saying it was far too early to even think about letting people back into Lower Manhattan. “[We] are concerned about even being asked to write a document for the public about re-entry at this point. Does this mean that unrestricted access to the WTC vicinity is imminent?” Kilbourne, a world-renowned epidemiologist, felt that the 4 percent asbestos that had been found in some early samples constituted a “substantial concentration,” but he feared there was more than just asbestos to worry about. “Contaminant groups of concern include acid gases, volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals,” he wrote. He was worried because the White House hadn’t even asked about them.4

  At around the same time Kilbourne sent that warning, Whitman was assuring New Yorkers that her agency was prepared to do everything in its power to ensure their safety. She told Newsweek magazine, “Everything will be vacuumed that needs to be, and filters will be cleaned. We’re not going to let anybody into a building that isn’t safe. And these buildings will be safe. The President has made it clear that we are to spare no expense on this one, and get this job done.” Reassuring words, but hardly the way the agency proceeded when, in the following months, it repeatedly tried to duck responsibility for the indoor cleanup.

  At the two-day ombudsman hearings early in 2002, the EPA had refused to show up or testify, convinced that it would not get a fair hearing. Martin sent a letter to the Region II administrator, Jane M. Kenny, stating that Stuyvesant and other schools were being recontaminated, a problem that “must be addressed immediately.” Martin followed up with a long memo outlining the conclusions of his investigation into the agency’s ground zero response and made several recommendations, among them that the EPA use its authority under the National Contingency Plan and President Clinton’s Directive #62, to clean all the buildings—inside and out—that had been contaminated by trade center dust.

  By this time, Martin and Whitman were engaged in an all-out struggle for control of the ombudsman’s office, a spat that predated September 11. Since he had been hired for the position in 1992, Martin had intervened in many individual cases on behalf of local communities involved in EPA hazardous waste and Superfund programs. He had gotten toxic wastes removed, residents relocated, and pesticides investigated. As an independent representative of the communities, he had often pressured the EPA to be more transparent and to respond more quickly to the community concerns. But during the Bush administration, Martin’s activism rubbed some the wrong way. The EPA under Whitman had started to push back, seeking a way to rein him in. She decided to move the duties of the ombudsman’s office to the office of the Inspector General for the EPA, essentially bringing it into the EPA’s own house and truncating its independence. Martin fought back, lining up congressional support to remain independent. It wasn’t enough, and in April 2002, Whitman succeeded in her plans to take control of the ombudsman’s office. In protest, Martin resigned.

  That same month, under growing community pressure, Whitman formed a special task force to look into the issue of contaminated indoor air. In late April, Bloomberg asked the EPA to take the lead on indoor air, and in May, the city, along with the EPA, announced the start of a voluntary cleanup program paid for with federal funds. When she outlined the program, Jane Kenny, the regional administrator, said that testing and scientific analysis made it clear that residents weren’t facing any immediate risks from dust in their homes. The agency was moving ahead with a program because “people should not have to live with uncertainty about their futures.” She stated, flat out, “There is no emergency here.”

  The World Trade Center disaster was not the first calamity in which the EPA was expected to take charge of indoor space as well as the air, soil, and water outdoors. In Libby, Mont., a town contaminated by tailings from an asbestos mining operation, Whitman had just a few days before 9/11 told residents and local businesses that the EPA would protect them from ever having to assume the cost of cleaning up their own homes.

  In New York, the federal agency became a reluctant participant in the widening ground zero cleanup. Pressure from the ombudsman, local officials, and the increasingly well-organized residents themselves left little choice but to step in. The EPA contracted with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s health department to undertake the cleaning of thousands of apartments and residential common areas. The EPA itself would handle the analysis of air and dust samples from the buildings.

  Many New Yorkers saw the EPA’s method of selecting those residences as a symbol of the agency’s mishandling of the whole disaster. Up to this time, the EPA had not done any kind of systematic testing to determine the physical extent of the contamination. Although logic and experience dictate that such testing should precede any serious cleanup, neither the EPA nor any other agency had undertaken the work. Instead of starting at ground zero and moving out in concentric circles while sampling for contaminants in apartments and offices (where the contaminants would be sheltered from the rain and wind that had washed away some of the hazards on the streets) until none were found, the agency relied on visual evidence from aerial photographs along with anecdotal information to set the boundaries of the cleanup program at Canal Street, the broad commercial strip that cuts across Lower Manhattan about a mile north of ground zero. Any resident or landlord below Canal Street could ask to participate. Even though a number of independent surveys found significant contamination in buildings se
veral blocks north of Canal Street and in parts of Brooklyn, those residents were out of luck. If they wanted their residences cleaned, they’d have to foot the bill—which Martin estimated could run as high as $10,000, not including the cost of testing to make sure it had been done right.

  When the federally funded cleanups began, crews hired by the city showed up with vacuum cleaners, mops, and rags to wipe up visible dust and then test to make sure the contaminants were gone. Many of the workers were immigrants without legal documents who had little or no training in handling asbestos-containing dust. They worked in jeans and T-shirts, often without respirator masks. They wiped down surfaces and vacuumed where they could—hardly the kind of cleanup the EPA recommends for loose asbestos fibers. It was a half-hearted approach that gave the agency the right to say it had responded. But it was doomed to failure. Multifamily residential buildings were treated as an aggregate of individual units rather than a single, interconnected system. Because the program was voluntary, it could not guarantee that contaminated material had been removed from an entire building, no matter how vigorously an individual apartment had been scrubbed. This led to the real possibility that even apartments that had been cleaned could be contaminated again by dust from the apartment next door or down the hall that had not been cleaned. Common spaces such as lobbies and hallways also could spread dust through the rest of the building if not cleaned properly. And just as a person’s lungs and circulatory system can carry dangers throughout the body, heating systems and ventilation ducts could spread contamination through every apartment in a building. Some residents refused to participate, and many landlords, worried about potential liability, did not let the cleaning crews in.

  Some of the earliest health studies undertaken at this time gave residents ample reason for concern. Dr. Anthony M. Szema, a professor of medicine at Stony Brook School of Medicine on Long Island who had been following children with asthma in New York’s Chinatown for several years, looked at how exposure to the dust had affected those children.5 He found a significant increase in the number of times kids with asthma who lived within 5 miles of ground zero went to the doctor in the year after the attacks. They also received more asthma prescriptions, indicating that the dust had significantly worsened their conditions. Independently, researchers from Mount Sinai found that, among 187 women who were pregnant on September 11 (including 12 who were inside the towers that day but escaped before the collapse), there was a twofold greater risk of low birth-weight babies at delivery, which raised concern about their future growth.6

  And Joan Reibman, the NYU pulmonologist, worked with the New York State Department of Health and the New York Academy of Medicine to canvass 2,166 residents of Lower Manhattan in the months immediately following the attacks.7 Because mail delivery had been interrupted, the researchers went door to door to question some residents in their apartments. Their medical conditions were compared with those of a control group living more than a mile away from ground zero. Reibman found that the residents of Lower Manhattan who said that before 9/11 they were healthy were significantly more likely to report coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath after the attacks than were those who lived uptown. People who had asthma and breathing problems before 9/11 reported that their symptoms had gotten worse and that they were forced to use asthma medications more often. Based on what she found in the limited polling she did, Reibman expanded her asthma clinic at Bellevue Hospital to treat residents who had developed respiratory symptoms after being exposed to the dust. She also agreed to see the undocumented (and uninsured) immigrant workers who had cleaned the apartments.

  By the time the voluntary cleanup ended in summer 2003, only a small portion of more than 20,000 downtown residences had been tested. The EPA analyzed samples from 4167 apartments in 453 buildings in Lower Manhattan.8 The agency also tested samples from 793 common areas in 144 buildings. But it did not attempt to clean any of the 330 office buildings, stores, warehouses, and schools below Canal Street. Nonetheless, the EPA touted the results as proof that there was little or no danger in the air. Only about 40 apartments, or 1 percent of the total tested, had asbestos contamination above the agency’s own standard for long-term risk. The program had lasted two years and cost $37.9 million. Of that amount, $7.5 million went to the EPA itself to cover oversight and sample analysis. The rest, $30.4 million, went to pay the cleaning contractors.

  But what Catherine McVay Hughes and other residents found most worrisome was that the cleaning crews had never gotten around to the hard-to-reach places, such as behind bookshelves or under beds, where asbestos dust could have settled into carpets or seeped under floorboards or wood trim. Parents knew instinctively that the space beneath a bed was anything but inaccessible for little children, who could use it as a hiding place, a fort, or a shelter during a thunderstorm. Moreover, the testing methods used to determine whether there was asbestos in the apartments were inadequate. Fibers that settled into carpets and drapes had to be aggressively moved around with a high-powered fan to be detected. That didn’t happen.

  A report by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General sharply criticized the cleanup, taking issue with its voluntary nature, the way it used inadequate testing equipment, the way it ignored commercial buildings where people worked, and generally, its inability to achieve the minimum standards needed to ensure pubic health.9 The inspector general’s office made several recommendations. It urged the agency to verify that apartments that had been cleaned and or tested had not been recontaminated. It also called for the EPA to get ready for the next emergency by developing clear guidelines for handling indoor contamination.

  With so much criticism heaped on the initial cleanup effort, an effort that the majority of downtown residents had ignored, the residents again turned to Senator Clinton. At the time, President Bush nominated Michael Leavitt, who had replaced Whitman at the EPA, for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. During the confirmation process, Clinton made it clear that she would block Leavitt’s nomination unless the EPA responded to the mounting fears of downtown residents. James. L. Connaughton, chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, signaled that the administration was willing to meet Clinton’s demands, even if there was little scientific need for more testing. In a letter to Clinton, Connaughton wrote that the agency was willing to take certain steps “to provide greater collaboration in ongoing efforts to monitor the situation for New York residents and assure them of their current safety,” as if their safety were assured.10

  The EPA agreed to set up a panel of technical experts to “recommend any steps to further minimize the risks associated with the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.” The panel included individuals who had been studying the 9/11 dust since 2001, including Dr. David Prezant of the fire department and Dr. Paul Lioy of the environmental institute at Rutgers. After protests, the agency also agreed to include on the panel a single liaison to the Lower Manhattan residential community: Catherine McVay Hughes.

  McVay Hughes was surprised to be asked to participate in a panel filled with geologists, medical doctors, and technical experts. Her own scientific training was limited to hydraulic geology and what she had picked up at NYPIRG’s lead abatement programs, although the difficult months since the trade center had been destroyed had given her a crash course in chemistry, physics, and toxicology. She was committed to representing the families of Lower Manhattan, along with the workers, the students, and the visitors who were living with the remnants of the dust clouds.

  The panel itself would not have the power to decide what should be done next. Its role was to simply advise the EPA. Given the high profile of its work, the pressure from Clinton, and the EPA’s urgent need to shore up its own damaged reputation, it was widely thought that the panel’s recommendations could be rejected only at the agency’s peril.

  However, it became clear from the outset that action wouldn’t be the panel’s trademark. Unwieldy at 15 members tapped from positions all
over the country, and meeting in public gatherings in Lower Manhattan not far from ground zero with an uncertain mandate from an agency that had an indelicate connection to the problem, the panel was put together like a bureaucratic camel, and everyone knew it. Its first meeting in spring 2004 had to be halted soon after it began because the auditorium in the old Customs Building in Lower Manhattan where it was being held sprang a leak. Water flooded down the stairs, and though there was no panic, it was generally taken as a sign of just how unpredictable and difficult to control the entire process would be.

  For residents and downtown workers who rarely had a chance to face Bush administration officials, the panel’s meetings became a prickly forum for venting years of anger and frustration. Responding to the outpouring of emotion, the panel agreed to go beyond the EPA’s central promise of retesting already-cleaned apartments. Members listened to residents and office workers testify that they had been misled, misinformed, ignored, and abused. “It’s all very well to talk about the recontamination issue, but you haven’t begun the work of finding out what was contaminated in the first place,”11 testified Robert Gulack, an attorney who said he had developed asthma from working in a downtown building that had not been cleaned properly. Downtown resident Barbara Caporale told the panel, “We’re tired of being considered collateral damage,”12 as she pleaded for federal help to extend far beyond the arbitrary Canal Street boundary. Listening to the passion and fear in their voices, the board agreed to broaden its mandate into other areas of the city and to determine more stringent levels of abatement than the original program. But first it had to settle a basic question of science.