The Air We Breathe: Ground Zero and the Lies About Trade Center Dust

Let’s talk about the air around Ground Zero and about the incredible evasions of the truth regarding its safety by the City of New York after 9/11. On this subject, there’s a callousness about the lying that seems to be in direct and proportionally opposite relationship to the overwhelming care and concern with which workers on the scene reacted to the tragic events of September 2001. The efforts of so many, working to bring New York back and to bring some closure to the families of the victims, were treated with almost total disrespect by those who were entrusted with ensuring the safety of Ground Zero workers.

That seven of ten of the workers at the site of the former Trade Towers now suffer chronic respiratory illness shouldn’t come as a surprise, when one considers the air quality tests that were taken of the area around the site immediately after the disaster. According to then-unreleased city data, unearthed by the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project:

The city had taken 87 outdoor air tests between September 12 and September 29.
Seventeen showed asbestos levels deemed hazardous by both the city and the EPA.
Other tests were classified as “overloads”— meaning that there was so much part-
iculate dust in the collection device that no reading could be taken.
(Grand Illusion by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins)

The above air sample data was shared by the city with the EPA, even while both Mayor Giuliani and EPA head Christie Todd Whitman were extolling the safety of the air around downtown Manhattan. In fact, the Mayor argued against federal oversight of the cleanup and city officials told the EPA it wanted to take charge of indoor air cleanup issues locally. The city’s main goal seemed to be proving that New York was safe and open for business. If that meant putting those workers at risk who took on the dirty job of making the city whole again, then so be it. The 30,000 residents of the area and the folks streaming back to downtown businesses, well, they’d be guinea pigs too.

It was clear, early on, that the particulate in the air at Ground Zero contained a finely ground powder of fiberglass, dust, bone fragments, asbestos, lead, and a wide variety of materials that were never before airborne in the kind of volume that the Twin Towers brought down with them when they fell. Yet there was no attempt by the city to reach out for help to keep workers and residents safe— even mask regulations were widely ignored at the Ground Zero site.

In fact, whenever health issues came up after the Towers came down, they were downplayed. Mayor Giuliani even went so far as to publicly take issue with a Mount Sinai Hospital physician, shortly after 9/11, when he speculated that the long-term health effects on those exposed to the dust and rubble at Ground Zero could be serious.

The estimated 1.2 million tons of Trade Center dust permeated the area around downtown Manhattan for months. For months after 9/11, when office workers left their downtown buildings later than rush hour, they would see city trucks out there, hosing down the streets nightly to make them clean in the morning. Every evening, the spray would clean off a fresh coat of the light grey powder that would accumulate on every outdoor surface of the financial district. Yet the city health department suggested that it wasn’t necessary to wear a mask while removing Trade Center dust, even as the EPA hired a certified asbestos abatement contractor to clean its own regional office, located just outside the hazard zone.

Since the city wasn’t appealing for federal help with the cleanup, most large downtown building cleaning crews had no experience with hazardous materials. Many were made up of low-paid immigrants, a high percentage of whom were undocumented, most of whom were given little instruction on preventive measures to protect themselves from the toxins contained in the matter they mopped up. They usually worked without the HEPA (high-efficiency particle-arresting) vacuums the EPA used and advised. After their work was done, most of these workers left the job without any follow-up health checks. Their fates are largely unknown.

The same cannot be said about Ground Zero workers. Most of the men and women at the site have documented their health issues after working at the disaster site. Their asthma rates are 12 times the expected average. For those who worked more than 90 days on the site, the rate is double that. Respiratory diseases are rampant and many have become disabled or died. Even local residents reported that 42.7 percent had at least one persistent upper respiratory symptom during the following year.

Yet the fates of workers, firemen, and other first responders, as well as area residents remain unheralded in the mainstream. It’s been left to a few environmental groups and unions, like the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, the International Association of Firefighters, and to a very few reporters, like Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, to unearth the facts and attempt to shine a light upon them (the data they uncovered are the backbone of this post—see their expose, Grand Illusion).

While Rudy Giuliani, ‘America’s Mayor’ is strutting his fame as a Presidential candidate and as the media hero of 9/11, the people who did the dirty work that day and those who stayed in the pit thereafter still wait for the healthcare they need and the respect they deserve. Their attempts to bring the nation’s attention to their plight and to the government inattention that put them unnecessarily in harm’s way deserve our response.