From the first moments of the catastrophe, asbestos had been fingered as the worst villain, but as Paul Lioy well knew, the trade center dust that he kept in his cold room consisted of many different substances besides asbestos. To expand the cleaning program, there would have to be a way to determine whether any hazardous material that was encountered had indeed come from the trade center site. Looking for traces of asbestos in a crowded old city such as New York would be an insurmountable task because so many different sources of asbestos fibers exist—pipe and boiler insulation, car and truck brake pads, roofing material, and more. Merely finding asbestos in the settled dust of an apartment would not be proof it had come from the trade center. Similarly, lead could not easily be singled out as having come from computer monitors and TV screens at ground zero. Dangerous amounts of lead dust could be found in any apartment with lead-based paints. The EPA knew it would find those contaminants if it looked for them, and it understood that following that trail would lead down an endless rabbit hole costing billions and lasting years. The agency also had to be aware that unless it discovered a way to distinguish trade center material from common urban dust, the cleanup program would leave the impression that the tower’s destruction had, indeed, created a public health hazard of immense proportions, which was the opposite of the agency’s position.
Scientists on the technical panel agreed that some other kind of distinguishing marker or unique signature was needed. After studying different materials for more than a year, they settled on slag wool, the fire-retardant coating sprayed on steel beams in the towers after asbestos insulation was no longer used. The panel believed that if slag wool showed up in dust samples from the residential, institutional, and commercial buildings within that test zone, the EPA could conclude that they had been contaminated by the trade center disaster and would perform a cleanup free of charge.
Moreover, the panel recommended a way to eliminate the uncertainty left by the earlier cleanup. Using statistical analysis, it proposed sampling 150 buildings in a measured grid twice the size of the original, extending above Canal Street and over to parts of Brooklyn. If slag wool were found in the test buildings, they would be cleaned, along with all other buildings in the zone. This time, commercial buildings would be included and entire floors of buildings would be decontaminated. When the boundaries of the cleanup area were established, the panel wanted to offer a far more thorough cleaning than before, extending to the areas under beds and behind heavy furniture. Crews would be instructed to look for four different contaminants of concern: asbestos, lead, vitreous (fiberglass) fibers, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (soot from uncontrolled fires). The air testing also would be more aggressive, with powerful fans used to stir up remaining fibers so that delicate testing instruments could detect them.
It was an ambitious extension of the first cleanup, and as the panel broadened its scope, residents continued to demand more, as if the panel could undo all the mistakes of the past. The EPA was not comfortable with the mission creep. But before any decision could be made, independent outside experts had to review the data used to justify a slag wool marker. The peer reviewers criticized the panel’s conclusions. They believed that because slag wool was heavier than other elements in dust, it might not have traveled far, and its absence could give a false reading about whether World Trade Center dust was present.
By this time, Lioy and other panel members were becoming increasingly frustrated. The EPA was giving clear signs that no matter what the panel suggested, it was going to do things its own way. And certain groups of residents kept demanding more from the cleanup program, while attacking the panel members for being unresponsive. Lioy felt shell-shocked at the end of some of the meetings, where he was portrayed as representing a recalcitrant government agency that was digging in its heels no matter what New Yorkers said.
As residents continued to snipe at the panel, Prezant and another panel member, Jeanne Mager Stellman, from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, drew up an alternative plan that would dispense with testing and simply clean indoor spaces within a designated perimeter, assuming that any contaminants that were found should be removed, regardless of where they had originated. But the EPA wasn’t interested. It was still on record as saying there wasn’t anything to be worried about.
When the peer reviewers formally rejected the slag wool marker, chaos ensued. Some panel members accused the EPA of having deliberately sabotaged the effort by sending incomplete data for review. Others, including Lioy, argued that the reviewers had been tripped up by the way the material had been presented and that, with slight modifications, the slag wool studies could be accepted. But the EPA was impatient. The chairman of the panel, E. Timothy Oppelt, acting head of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, was scheduled to retire at the end of the year. He showed little enthusiasm for the panel’s work continuing indefinitely. McVay Hughes was dumbstruck. She had believed that the EPA had initially planned on “doing the right thing” for downtown residents and workers. But after the slag wool setback, signs of goodwill vanished.
What came next stunned even the members of the expert panel and outraged the Lower Manhattan community. Oppelt announced that the EPA had rejected all the panel’s recommendations. Instead, it would repeat the original voluntary cleanup program, with one catch. It would exclude apartments that had been cleaned before, obviating the possibility of doing what the agency had originally promised to do about determining the extent of recontamination. A few commercial buildings were included, but Brooklyn was left out again. The abridged program was given a budget of $7 million, the amount of money left over from the federal appropriation for the 2002–2003 program. It was a quick and easy accounting step intended to put a lasting end to the cleanup. After announcing the changes, Oppelt abruptly shut down the panel, thanked the members, and left for his retirement. Lioy, disappointed, told Oppelt it seemed clear that the EPA “felt this panel was the child of a lesser god” and strongly urged the agency to reconsider its decision. Prezant proposed a special one-day meeting to review modifications that would make the plan acceptable to the public and to the agency. Stellman called the new plan pointless. Downtown residents were the angriest, saying they felt betrayed by a process that only reaffirmed their belief that Washington didn’t care.
McVay Hughes and all but two of the remaining members of the technical panel refused to endorse the plan. One member said publicly that he would not, under those circumstances, recommend that anyone participate in the second cleanup because doing so would accomplish nothing. Micki Siegel de Hernández, who represented the labor community, saw the EPA’s decisions as a cynical move that reflected the worst aspects of Washington’s mishandling of the September 11 response. “This plan is the Bush administration’s plan,” she said at the panel’s last meeting. “This is not the panel’s plan and this is not the community’s plan.”
By the time the technical panel was disbanded, the downtown community’s anger toward Washington was palpable. Several fed-up residents had already banded together and, with help from Joel Kupferman, filed a class action lawsuit that accused Leavitt, Whitman, and the EPA of having endangered the public with false and misleading statements about safety around ground zero. The suit collected all the community’s grievances against Whitman and her agency, contending that they amounted to “a shockingly deliberate indifference to human health.” Although George W. Bush wasn’t named in the suit, it was clear that they believed every decision had been directed by or cleared through the White House. A district court judge sided with the residents, calling Whitman’s actions following the attacks “conscience shocking.” But in 2008, a federal appeals court overturned the ruling and dismissed the suit against Whitman and her agency.13
The EPA had organized a semiformal reception for panel members following the disastrous last meeting. McVay Hughes skipped the event. She was greatly disappointed in the agency’s actions and in the way the panel’s advice had be
en dismissed. After cooling off with some friends, she walked back to her apartment on Broadway, eager to make sure her air purifiers were working properly.
When registration for the second EPA cleanup was opened to the public in 2007, turnout was just as poor as the panel members had predicted. The residents of just 183 downtown apartments out of the thousands eligible signed up for it, along with the owners of 21 residential and commercial buildings who wanted the EPA to test lobbies, corridors, and other common areas. By the time the samples were taken, seven years had passed since the towers had come down. Most of the samples were negative for asbestos and other hazards. With its budget of leftover dollars, the EPA eventually cleaned only 16 apartments and the common areas of 14 of the 21 buildings. Rep. Nadler called the program an absolute failure. He was so outraged that he demanded an investigation by the Government Accountability Office. After reviewing the unfortunate history of the program, the office found that the EPA had obscured the results of its first cleanup, depriving residents of valuable information about the hazards in their apartments. The report criticized the agency for not calculating a realistic budget for the second cleanup and simply using up the $7 million left over from the first program. Finally, the report found that the EPA had not done anything in the second program to correct the errors of the first—or to better prepare the agency to handle future disasters.
A short time after the technical panel’s disbanding had caused such anguish in Lower Manhattan, McVay Hughes received a lumpy package in the mail from the EPA. Inside was a framed certificate honoring her for her work on the technical panel over the previous two years. The agency had used a padded shipping envelope, but not enough cushioning had been used to protect the glass on the picture frame. When McVay Hughes opened the package, glass shards fell out. She felt it was an appropriate metaphor for her experience with the EPA. The formation of the technical panel in 2004 had seemed like an important achievement, but the process had broken down and ended in a trust-breaking fiasco. “Any expectation that the right thing would be done was shattered,” she said. “None of the goals that [the] EPA set out for the panel were realized. It was a public relations fiasco for the EPA and federal government. I think that the federal government was trying to wear the community down so that the will to find out the truth would diminish. However, in this case, it did not work.”
In the years since, she has often stood before the big copper-clad windows of her apartment, watching the reconstruction of ground zero grind ahead slowly. At times she has wondered about whether the EPA ever really did intend to do the right thing for the people downtown or was merely placating all those who were angry and frustrated. She is thankful that her boys are healthy, that her husband has not suffered any ill health effects, and that, despite being diagnosed with reactive airways disorder, she can still breathe normally if she just avoids construction sites and other dirty environments. The family’s lucky 13th-floor loft still feels like home to them. And although McVay Hughes never received any compensation from FEMA except to cover the cost of one of the six air purifiers she keeps running all the time, she is grateful for the FEMA inspector who cautioned her not to bring back her family until the fires were completely extinguished. But she worries constantly about her downtown neighbors who haven’t been so lucky, such as one woman who came down with pancreatic cancer and another who can’t walk more than a few feet without stopping to catch her breath, and all the others who felt abandoned by Washington at the time of their greatest need.
Endnotes
1 Personal interview, 1 June 2009.
2 Bartlett, Sarah, and John Petrarca, Schools of Ground Zero, American Public Health Association and Healthy Schools Network, Inc., 2002.
3 Chatfield, Eric J. and John R. Kominsky, Ground Zero Task Force, “Characterization of Particulate Found in Apartments after Destruction of the World Trade Center,” October 12, 2001.
4 Gonzalez, Juan, “Doc’s WTC Note: Don’t Hurry Back,” New York Daily News, 28 October 2003, p. 19.
5 Szema, A.M., Khedkar, M., Maloney, P.F., et al., “Clinical Deterioration in Pediatric Asthmatic Patients After September 11, 2001,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 113, no. 3 (March 2004): 420–426.
6 Berkowitz, Gertrud S., Wolf, M.S., Janevic, T.M., et al., “The World Trade Center and Intrauterine Growth Restriction,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 290, no. 5 (August 2003): 596–598.
7 Lin, Shao, Reibman, Joan, Bowers, James, et al., “Upper Respiratory Symptoms and Other Health Effects Among the Residents Living Near the Former World Trade Center After the September 11 Disaster,” Epidemiology 15, no. 4 (July 2004).
8 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, World Trade Center Residential Dust Cleanup Program: Final Report, December 2005. Available at www.epa.gov/wtc/finalreport/pdfs/full_final_report.pdf.
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), 47.
10 Read into the Congressional Record, 27 October 2003, 13, 250.
11 EPA Technical Panel hearing, 31 March 2004.
12Ibid.
13Benzman, et al v. Whitman, et al. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, April 22, 2008, Docket Number 06-1166.
9. Such money grubbers as these
On September 11, 2001, a Republican triumvirate controlled the White House, the State House in Albany, and City Hall in New York City. But with the exception of Republican Vito Fossella of Staten Island (the city’s most conservative borough), New York City’s congressional delegation was chock full of Democrats. This political and ideological gap made it all but inevitable that there would be a deep chasm between the parties, even over something as tragic and nonpartisan as ground zero.
Besides Sen. Hillary Clinton, those who had most aggressively demanded that Washington pay attention to the dust were the unlikely pair of Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both were outspoken critics of the Bush administration, and both—by their attitudes and their accents—were children of New York, even though Maloney had been born in North Carolina and had managed to modulate her moderate Southern drawl with brash New York overtones. Maloney, whose district included the silk stocking Upper East Side as well as parts of Queens, is tall, blonde, and loud. Nadler, a born New Yorker who graduated from Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and who spent 16 years in the State Assembly before going to Congress in 1993(the same year as Maloney), is short, round, and aggressively insistent on getting attention for his district, which includes ground zero. The two of them, and their staffs, doggedly challenged an uninterested Washington to assume responsibility for what they argued time and again had been not just an attack on New York, but a deadly strike at the heart of the nation, requiring a response not just from the city and its allies, but from the whole country by way of Washington. Their most powerful weapons were outrage, anger, and, at times, invective and exaggeration.
Clinton, Maloney, and Nadler were practiced in the art of political denunciation. All three were Capitol Hill veterans who understood the power of sound bites, punchy quotes, and a measure of scorn. They freely tossed around the term hero, using it to refer to the tens of thousands who had flocked to the pile, as well as to those who died in the attack. For them, there often was little difference between the firefighters who scrambled over the debris looking for survivors, individuals who came months later when it was strictly a demolition site offering unlimited overtime, and those who, driven by their own desires, came to ground zero and did little more than hand out water bottles. All were heroes, all deserving of the government’s attention, all liable to have become sick because of the administration’s mishandling of the unprecedented rescue and recovery operation. There was little sense of reckoning that if everyone was a hero, then none could truly be heroes. Equally, no distinction was drawn among their symptoms. One responder’s runny nose be
came the moral equivalent of another’s scarred lungs; one’s skin rash equal to another’s burned thorax.
In front of the cameras, the elected officials denounced the Bush administration’s distracted attitude toward what they believed was New York’s health emergency. Nadler and Maloney both regularly appeared at rallies with responders, condemning the White House for its failure to act. Some of the hard work of forcing a reluctant administration to acknowledge that the cleanup had come at a tragic price fell to their staffs, who spent long hours digging through documents, reaching out to angry responders all over the nation, and focusing attention on a problem that, despite the rhetoric shaping it as an attack on America, most people in Washington considered a local issue.
Although the entire New York delegation played a role in this effort, Maloney and her staff often led the charge in getting the government to provide some measure of healthcare for those who needed it. Hundreds of her constituents died in the attacks, and on that first morning, she had worried about several close friends who worked inside the twin towers. She had driven back to New York in a panic that day and was at ground zero almost immediately, breathing in the dust and seeing through teary eyes the impact it was having on those who worked there. She tirelessly crusaded on behalf of the responders, appearing with them so often over the years that she came to know many by their first names. Maloney was supported by a strong staff, led by Benjamin Chevat, her chief of staff, and legislative aide Edward Mills, who demonstrated the two-tiered way Washington works. On one level, the cameras focus on the elected officials. But behind the scenes, the grunt work that goes into the passage of controversial legislation gets done by those whose names never appear on a ballot.
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