After the World Trade Center fell, many shaken New Yorkers took unexpected comfort in numbers. As the mayor's initial order for 10,000 body bags was gradually displaced by an increasingly verifiable estimated body count, the calamity began, strangely, to feel almost fathomable.
But in recent months, new figures have come to define more enduring fears forresidents and workers in lower Manhattan. For instance, 180,000 gallons of fuelburned or spilled as the towers collapsed, including 30,000 gallons ofelectrical-transformer fluids that contain PCBs. And then there are the hundredsof thousands of atomized fluorescent bulbs, each containing a few dozen milligramsof mercury--possibly enough to help explain the high levels of heavy metals thathave kept the headquarters of the Legal Aid Society, across the street fromground zero, sealed since September 11. A veteran hazardous-waste chemist for theEnvironmental Protection Agency now reports that independent testing of dustinside nearby apartments shows a density of asbestos fibers nine times greaterthan had been officially reported--more, even, than at the infamous W.R. Gracemine-turned-Superfund-site in Libby, Montana.
Literally before the dust had cleared, the administration of New York'sthen-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani assured a terrified city that the air was safe. OnSeptember 16, the city's health department issued a public statement declaringthat "the general public's risk for any short or long term adverse health[effects is] extremely low." The same day, EPA Administrator Christie ToddWhitman volunteered her own bill of clean health: "There's no need for thegeneral public to be concerned."
Many people who live or work in lower Manhattan are convinced that they havenot been told the truth. They say that they're sick--throats sore, lungs hacking.Cleanup workers, local residents, and, most of all, firefighters at ground zeroattest to intense respiratory illnesses unlike anything they recall experiencingbefore.
Posttraumatic stress in a psychically wounded quarter surely accounts for someof these reactions; midtown's anthrax panics have already given New York apowerful lesson in health hysteria. But a persistent trickle of new informationhas made it embarrassingly clear that federal, state, and city agenciesresponsible for protecting public health and the environment have failed to admitpublicly a very simple fact: No one can yet claim to know the extent of theenvironmental fallout.
"Government pronouncements regarding air quality have emphasized the goodnews," says Eric Goldstein, who as co-director of the Natural Resources DefenseCouncil's Urban Program is undertaking a yearlong study of the environmentalimpact of the disaster. "There was an oversimplified message sent that long-termhealth standards were being met, and that probably didn't convey the extent ofthe situation." The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation hasrefused to release any information at all, asserting that the World Trade Centerenvironment is a matter of criminal investigation. While the EPA made public itsfindings on asbestos levels early on, the agency didn't supply data related to themany other substances known to be on the site until the New York CityEnvironmental Law and Justice Project filed a Freedom of Information Act requestdemanding it.
If government officials hoped to minimize fears that lower Manhattan was nolonger a safe place to live or work, they had plenty of help from New York'smedia. Virtually the only local source of investigative coverage on environmentalhazards has been Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the New York Daily News. On October 26, he made the front page with "A Toxic Nightmare at a Disaster Site," which detailed the EPA tests' findings of notable quantities of hazardous benzene, as well as dioxin levels discharged from a sewer pipe into the Hudson River that were more than five times higher than any previously recorded in New York Harbor.
That day, the mayor and EPA officials held a joint press conference to refutethe story; spokespeople claimed that "spikes" in toxin levels did not indicatepotential health hazards. Giuliani's views were more than incidental to theDaily News, whose executive editor, Michael Goodwin, is married to a Giuliani appointee and whose editorial-page editor, Richard J. Schwartz, previously worked in City Hall, where he authored Giuliani's welfare policies. One late-September editorial was adamant that officials in charge of rebuilding at the site should minimize environmental reviews and any other "red tape" obstructing redevelopment.
Gonzalez's subsequent stories gave New York its only insights into thewitches' brew that cooked, compressed, and dispersed at ground zero. According toGonzalez, asbestos-cleanup instructions were dangerously lax, and the PCB contentof transformer-oil spills has not been verified by anyone outside of Con Edison,the utility that operated a substation behind 7 World Trade Center. But not allof Gonzalez's reporting has seen print. Since the initial piece, his twice-weeklycolumn has failed to appear at least seven times. Though he won't comment on whythese columns have been delayed, or exactly what they contained, Gonzalezacknowledges that this is no ordinary story.
"In 25 years as a reporter, I've never faced as much scrutiny or as muchdifficulty getting stories in the paper as I have had around this issue," he says."There's been enormous concern expressed by some government officials and somecivic leaders about my reporting, that it's unnecessarily alarming people, and Ibelieve that some of these government officials are doing a disservice byunnecessarily saying that things are okay when they really don't know."
The Daily News has been covering the story more aggressively than any paper in New York, detailing the health problems of undocumented cleanup workers and, in January, breaking the news that the EPA ombudsman has launched an investigation into the agency's response to the disaster.
By contrast, The New York Times has run at least 13 stories emphasizing the safety of the site, even using the headline "Workers and Residents Are Safe, Officials Say" to characterize a city council hearing that included extensive expert testimony emphasizing the lack of reliable information. An extensive mid-October story titled "Dust and Its Effects" stressed that significant health risks were limited to unprotected workers at ground zero. According to that story, EPA officials reported "no signs" of dioxins or other toxic organic compounds. A week and a half later, when the federal agency finally released its data, the Times clarified that tests indeed found such substances at the site, though not at levels high enough to prompt health concerns.
Farther from ground zero, reporters have been less shy about seriouslyinvestigating air quality in lower Manhattan. In January, Pulitzer Prize winnerAndrew Schneider published a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assessing the asbestos hazard and detailing the inadequacy of the instructions city health officials gave the public (these included the advice to use a wet rag or mop to clean up fallout dust). A week earlier, The Washington Post had focused on public-health complaints and the leading independent findings; that day, the EPA ombudsman announced his investigation.
With the backing of Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York, whosedistrict includes ground zero, EPA ombudsman Robert Martin and his chiefinvestigator, Hugh Kaufman, are focusing on the environmental agency's insistencethat assessing and cleaning up dust from the disaster are the responsibility oflandlords of nearby apartment and office buildings. The World Trade Center towerswere public buildings, but neither their owner, the Port Authority of New Yorkand New Jersey, nor the city's health department has undertaken indoor testing orremediation of adjacent sites.
EPA officials contend that measurements taken at the perimeter of ground zeroare indicative of the safety of the surrounding neighborhoods. "People living andworking in the area should take comfort in the fact that EPA air samples ofpollutants such as benzene, dioxin and sulfur dioxide taken at the perimeter ofthe work site are either very low or non-detectable," Kathleen Callahan, actingdeputy regional administrator for the agency, told the New York City Council'senvironmental committee in early November.
But Kaufman insists that any serious assessment has to focus on indoor dustand soot, substances that get trapped in buildings' ventilation systems. Thiscourse of inquiry, he asserts, is standard procedure for investigating toxichazards whose pervasiveness is unknown. "Asbestos is the least of our concerns,"says Kaufman. "The EPA has found other substances, like mercury, benzene, dioxinsin the air. What's documented at certain [outdoor] sites doesn't indicate what'sgoing on in buildings and homes."
Some available information appears to support Kaufman's contention. Forinstance, EPA's tests indicated "nondetectable" levels of mercury in air and dustsamples at the perimeter of ground zero even while preliminary private testing bythe owner of Legal Aid's building "showed evidence of heavy metals," according toLegal Aid spokeswoman Pat Bath.
But the ombudsman may not be able to complete his investigation. In lateNovember, Whitman announced her intention to place the ombudsman's office underthe direct control of the EPA inspector general--a move that Martin says wouldeffectively end his autonomy. Martin and the Government Accountability Projecthave convinced a federal judge to halt the restructuring temporarily, arguingthat Whitman's ties to Citigroup, whose Travelers Insurance Center could havebeenliable for millions in cleanup costs as the result of a Martin investigation inDenver, spurred her to retaliate. The next court hearing has been scheduled forlate February.
In the meantime, Martin and Kaufman have come upon an auspicious opportunityto prove that they really are indispensable: On January 24, they launched aninquiry into the chlorine dioxide fumigation of the Hart Senate Office Building inWashington, D.C., where some returning staffers are complaining of headaches,sore throats, and bad smells.
