Ground Zero
Almost four years ago, on the old wordpress blog, I wrote about the environmental catastrophe of Ground Zero. Today marks ten years since the attack on the World Trade Center, so I thought it was appropriate to re-post because many of our new readers probably missed this story, and it’s something I believe more people should know about.
Originally from September 11th, 2007.
If we remember the heroes of 9/11, the first responders and ground zero workers, it’s not a clear picture.
Removed from public interest six years later, there are class action lawsuits against the city and its contractors, where 8,500 workers and civilians blame Sept. 11 for cancers, infections and other ailments they developed after the attacks. Some cases are known as the “WTC cough.” This is another ghost of 9/11: The air at the World Trade center was one of the most toxic waste sites in human history.
“The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident,” said David Worby, an attorney who represents thousands of cleanup workers.
Doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center who examined the workers charged that environmental officials failed to issue necessary warnings about the health danger. Last year Hillary Clinton said, “our government was not telling us the truth. The air was not safe to breathe. It was obvious that the air was hard to see through, let alone breathe.”
The truth is nobody had been exposed to anything like this before. The dust contained concrete, steel, glass, insulation, plastic, and computers. Dust analyses would detect glass shards, cement particles, cellulose fibers, asbestos; a mixture of harmful components, like lead, titanium, barium, and gypsum. In all, the dust contained more than 100 different compounds, some of which have never been identified. There were fires that burned for three months which gave off a blast of carcinogens—asbestos, dioxin, and benzeme. The U.S. Geological Survey, said the dust had high alkalinity levels that rivaled liquid Drano. 
Along with Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Senator Clinton called for an investigation of the EPA’s failure to carry out proper testing and cleanup of 9/11 pollution. It was only seven days after the attack when Christine Todd Whitman, the then administrator of the EPA, had a message for the citizens of New York City: “Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York…that their air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink.”
In an act of patriotic machismo, officials continued to make these failures worse by uplifting New Yorkers; they faced no long-term dangers from exposure to the air lingering over ground zero. Even “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, showed up without a mask. Briefly. By October, masks were warn on the site as little as 29 percent of the time.
It should be noted at the Pentagon attack site, OSHA sealed off the site and required the relief workers to wear hazmat suits.
Back to Whitman’s statement. In August 2003, the EPA inspector general issued a 155-page report that the agency did not have the data to make these declarations. In fact, more than a quarter of EPA samples showed unsafe levels of poisons.
However, the EPA was under pressure from the White House, as the inspector general report said, to “sanitize its warnings about ground zero.” The White House Council on Environmental Quality censored the agency’s press releases. They added reassuring statements and deleted cautionary ones. The air was clean, they said. Everything is okay.
In a recent Leonard Pitts column, the best of the “six years later editorials,” he repeated the question do you remember? “If so, then the world as it stands six years later must come as something of a shock,” he said, contrasted with the heroic deeds of that day.
Deception is how we moved forward. The reality is Sept. 11 took the lives of 2,603 New Yorkers but many more could die.
DTE recommends readers check out a Sierra Club report entitled, “Harmful Legacy of Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero: How Post 9/11 Disaster Policy Endangers America.” It warns that federal policies for national disasters compromise worker safety and this could happen again.
This ground zero pollution almost suggests the slow but worsening health issues that faced atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when thousands died in the years and decades that followed our country’s use of nuclear weapons. There is yet to be a comprehensive study of the health consequences on the estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers who raced to ground zero after the attacks - and these victims are scattered all over the country.
