For an index to all NYCOSH in the News articles, click here.

• Interim Report Criticizes Assurances by EPA on World Trade Center Air Quality - BNA Daily Environment Report, March 20, 2003
  
  
• EPA's 'Safe Air' Statements After 9/11 Criticized - Reuters, March 17, 2003
  
  
• Sept. 11 Ground Zero Air Assurances Disputed - Sacramento Bee, March 16, 2003
  
  
• Classroom Health Is Nothing to Sneeze At: NYSUT Conference Gives Cautionary Advice, Tips - New York Teacher, March 12, 2003
  
  
• Emergency Response: Nadler Says Workplaces Neglected In World Trade Center Dust Cleanup - Bureau of National Affairs Daily Environment Report, February 11, 2003
  
  
• Effects of 9/11 Continue to Ripple Through Construction Ranks - New York Construction News, February 2003
  
  
• Safety Provisions in New Contract Will Set the Industry Standard - Track News, January 6, 2003
  
  
• Air of Uncertainty - American Journalism Review, January/February 2003

Interim Report Criticizes Assurances by EPA on World Trade Center Air Quality

By John Herzfeld
BNA Daily Environment Report
March 20, 2003

NEW YORK--The Environmental Protection Agency did not have sufficient data to declare that the air in lower Manhattan was "safe to breathe" in the days following the collapse of the World Trade Center, according to the interim findings of an investigation by the agency's Office of the Inspector General.

The status report by an team looking into EPA's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster appeared to underscore criticisms leveled against the agency for more than a year by environmental and public health groups.

The status report, which is dated Jan. 27 and was made available by EPA critics including Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), also contains new information suggesting that the White House Council on Environmental Quality "heavily influenced" EPA public statements on the air quality around the World Trade Center site.

Selected electronic mail messages analyzed by the OIG team "indicated that CEQ dictated the content of early press releases," with EPA following all White House directions to add or delete material, the report said.

The report also found that EPA policies and procedures for approval of press releases "are stale," have not been revised since the early 1980s, and "appear not to be known or followed" by current agency press staff in Washington or New York. The question of who in the agency had final authority over the World Trade Center air quality press releases remains in dispute, the report indicated.

Asbestos Standard
In questioning the agency's assurances on the safety of the air around the site, the status report charged that EPA had borrowed an asbestos standard from school and demolition settings that had not been intended for general use as a health standard.

It further accused the agency of failing to acknowledge that "health standards do not exist" for the cumulative impact of exposure to several pollutants at once and that little was known of their synergistic effects. Also, it complained, "EPA's pronouncement did not address short-term impacts."

The agency did not have any data on 10 of 14 "pollutants of concern" identified by scientists as possibly being part of public exposure to the dust cloud, the report said.

Furthermore, the report charged, EPA based its assurances on a risk standard of 1-in-10, 000, or one cancer case expected per 10,000 exposed people, for only a limited number of carciniogenic pollutants. That conflicted with the agency's "traditional reliance" on a 1-in- 1,000,000 acceptable-risk standard for air toxics, and a 1-in-100,000 level to trigger action by industry to abate health risks, the report said.

A spokeswoman for EPA could not be reached for comment on the report.

National Contingency Program
On another point of contention, the report said EPA had "considered implementing" the National Contingency Program, a disaster response protocol for hazardous substances control, but had chosen against that step. Critics maintained that the pollution levels at the site should have triggered the program, which would have given EPA primacy over other government agencies and a more forceful role in managing such issues as indoor air contamination.

In preliminary recommendations, the report said EPA must improve risk communication to the public, improve risk characterization tools and processes, and develop scenarios in anticipation of emergency scenarios.

Commenting on the report, Nadler said, "The EPA never had a right to say the area was safe, because the agency never had any evidence to back it up."

He reiterated his past contentions that the agency was guilty of "malfeasance" in how it has handled the air quality issues (28 DEN A-12, 2/11/03 ).

Nadler added, "I will be interested to see what the final report says. But for now, this seems to be more confirmation that the EPA has bungled the whole situation from the get go." He called for the agency to "properly test" indoor spaces within range of the trade center dust cloud, using the most stringent standards and remediating any sites found with elevated levels of contaminants.

Concerns Previously Raised
Most of the report's content, except for the account of CEQ influence over the EPA press releases, has been aired previously by critics of the agency's conduct in the disaster and cleanup, said Dave Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a union and public health group. "But what's significant is that it is coming from within a government regulatory agency," he told BNA March 19. "NYCOSH and other groups have been raising questions and objections for the last year and a half, like a voice in the wilderness, without much official response from EPA," he said. "Now we have a report leaked from the OIG that seems to reflect our concerns."

Newman said NYCOSH hopes the OIG investigation will foster "increased government and media scrutiny to the public health issues in lower Manhattan" and a revisiting of the issue of environmental sampling.

The group is seeking "more intensive and extensive indoor sampling for a wider range of contaminants," he said, leading to additional cleanup efforts for residential spaces and an "overdue" initiation of remediation measures for commercial spaces. In the long run, Newman added, the goal should be to learn from the lessons of dealing with the World Trade Center attack to prepare for the risk of any future attacks.

"The report is devastating," he said. "We hope that what will come out of this is that EPA will follow the NCP in any future incidents of this magnitude, so that the agency will do the job it's supposed to do and that its staff probably would like to do."

EPA's 'Safe Air' Statements After 9/11 Criticized

By Keith Mulvihill
Reuters
March 17, 2003

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=2395008

An internal agency report is criticizing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for calling the air at Ground Zero "safe to breathe" during the days immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center.

The EPA did not have "sufficient data" to make this statement, the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) states in a preliminary report that has been leaked to the press. The OIG is an independent government group that reports directly to Congress.

A timeline within the draft, which was first reported on Sunday by the Sacramento Bee newspaper, indicates that a final draft may be released at the end of the month.

"We share many of the same concerns that the initial OIG report identifies and we are gratified that an independent government oversight agency ... has come to the same conclusions and expresses the same concerns that we have been expressing all along," said Dave Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH). NYCOSH is a labor union-based health and safety organization.

"It was premature and inappropriate for the EPA and Christie Whitman (the agency's administrator) to reassure the general public that the air was safe to breathe," Newman told Reuters Health.

"Particularly in light of the EPA's initial results from environmental sampling, which indicated a high percentage of their bulk samples contained 1 percent or greater asbestos," he added.

The report, obtained by Reuters Health, states that the EPA based its safe air declaration on a standard that was 100 times less protective than more traditional definitions of risk acceptability--one additional case of cancer among 10,000 affected people as opposed to one in a million.

This in itself is not a new revelation, according to Newman. "What is new is that there is a government agency raising these same concerns and being critical of the EPA," he said.

"Currently we don't know how widespread the contamination is, and we have no reason to believe that it is extensive, but on the other hand, we have no reason to believe that the situation is as benign as the government wants us to believe," said Newman.

"So we think that in order to ascertain exactly what the situation is, additional targeted testing needs to be done, primarily indoors for contaminants of potential concern."

If it is warranted, Newman recommended that appropriate clean-up procedures should be undertaken for both residences and workplaces in the area.

"This is a pretty devastating critique of the EPA," Newman concluded.

The EPA was unable to respond to requests for comment by deadline.

Sept. 11 Ground Zero Air Assurances Disputed

By Chris Bowman and Edie Lau
Sacramento Bee
March 16, 2003

http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/front/story/810022p-5756214c.html

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's pollution tests in the smoke-filled days following the World Trade Center collapse did not support the agency's pronouncements that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe, an independent federal investigation has found.

Further, the EPA reached its conclusion using a cancer risk level 100 times greater than what it traditionally deems "acceptable" for public exposure to toxic air contaminants, according to the EPA's Office of Inspector General.

The "preliminary conclusions," contained in an internal OIG document obtained by The Bee reinforce the views of many doctors and public health advocates involved in the medical evaluations of thousands of firefighters, volunteers, demolition workers and immigrant laborers who toiled in the thick of the dust, smoke and fumes.

"To say that it's safe, which suggests no risk - we just knew that was wrong," said Jonathan Bennett, spokesman for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a labor union advocacy group, which had doctors in a roving van seeing cleanup workers.

"The proof of this was in what you saw in the people in the van and in people being seen to this day at the Mount Sinai Medical Center," Bennett said.

More than half the Ground Zero workers screened by health experts nearly a year after the attacks continued to suffer from lung, ear, nose and throat problems, according to a study released in January by Mount Sinai, in New York.

The federally funded screening program so far has evaluated more than 3,500 of the estimated 40,000 workers directly involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup.

EPA officials declined comment Friday, noting that the inspector general's investigation is still under way.

"It is inappropriate for the EPA to be commenting on a document that is not final and that is being done independently," said Lisa Harrison, the agency's press secretary.

The preliminary findings by the EPA's Office of Inspector General are the latest in a series of criticisms that doctors, scientists and politicians have leveled against the EPA over its response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the twin towers.

The EPA's ombudsman at the time, Robert Martin, said in testimony last year before a Senate subcommittee that the EPA "has provided erroneous information to the public" and has "not used the best available technology to measure asbestos levels."

Martin later resigned in protest, saying EPA Administrator Christie Whitman moved to silence him. Whitman denies the charge.

A U.S. Geological Survey team found shortly after the attacks that some dust from the site was as caustic as drain cleaner because of the high concentration of pulverized cement, an alkaline substance. The team's conclusion, revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, had been sent to the EPA and other government agencies, but none made the finding public.

And, in February last year, scientists at the University of California, Davis, reported that dust and fumes from the smoldering rubble exposed lower Manhattan residents to some of the highest levels of air pollution ever recorded.

A study published last fall in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 332, or 3.3 percent, of the 9,914 New York City firefighters on the scene in the week after Sept. 11 developed "World Trade Center cough," a severe and persistent hacking.

"Within 24 hours after exposure, all 332 firefighters with World Trade Center cough reported having a productive cough; the sputum was usually black to grayish and infiltrated with 'pebbles or particles,'" the article states.

Dr. Ghulam Saydain, a pulmonologist at Nassau University Medical Center on Long Island, said some of the more than 600 patients - mainly firefighters and police - seen at the center's Ground Zero clinic developed "significant" respiratory disease.

"Many of them are getting better, and some of them, even after - it's been more than 1 1/2 years now - still have symptoms," Saydain said.

Thomas Cahill, a physicist and international authority on air pollution who led the UCD study, said his laboratory analyses of air samples showed that the towers' collapse spewed enormous amounts of potentially lethal, extremely tiny particles of crushed and incinerated computers, glass, furniture and other building debris unrecognized by the EPA's air monitoring.

"The EPA made a series of rather ordinary measurements and made pronouncements that were not supported by the facts," Cahill said last week upon learning of the OIG report.

The OIG has been investigating the EPA's handling of the World Trade Center fallout for more than a year, a spokeswoman said.

Though connected to the EPA, the agency has no authority over the inspection teams. The OIG acts as a public watchdog, investigating allegations of agency fraud, abuse and negligence. It reports to Congress.

The document obtained by The Bee is an internal OIG "status report" on the World Trade Center investigation. The report summarizes investigators' "preliminary conclusions" to date, based on interviews and document reviews, and outlines work in progress.

An OIG spokeswoman confirmed the report is accurate as of its date - Jan. 27 - but cautioned that the findings cited could change before publication, which is expected in mid-May.

"The information on there is not solid because our work is not concluded yet," said Eileen McMahon, an OIG spokeswoman.

A chief objective of the investigation is to determine whether air pollution monitoring data from the collapse site and in the surrounding New York financial district support what EPA told the public about the health risks.

Whitman, the agency administrator, made repeated assurances in the first few weeks after Sept. 11 that the air around the wreckage largely was safe to breathe.

"Given the scope of the tragedy ... I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that the air is safe to breathe, and their water is safe to drink," Whitman announced one week after the terrorist strikes.

In the January status report to Office of Inspector General managers, a team of six investigators said that it had concluded Whitman's declarations were premature.

"EPA did not have sufficient data to declare the ambient (outside) air 'safe to breathe' when it did," the report states.

The report cites several reasons:

- The EPA had data on only four of 14 pollutants that scientists believe the public potentially was exposed to immediately after the collapse of the twin towers.

- The criterion the EPA used to conclude asbestos levels were safe is not health-based. Rather, it is a crude standard applied to schools that have undergone asbestos removal, to make sure contractors made no major mistakes.

- The EPA's pronouncements did not address short-term health impacts.

- The agency's air quality standards are not applicable to this kind of pollution event: enormous clouds of finely pulverized glass, concrete and gypsum and a superheated pile of rubble that spewed ultrafine particles and poisons into the air for weeks.

"Health standards do not exist for (the) cumulative impact of exposure to several pollutants at once or the synergistic impact of air toxins unknown and little studied," the report states.

Also, the inspection team said it learned that the EPA applied a dramatically higher level of "acceptable risk" in making its pronouncements.

"EPA's conclusion that the air was safe is based on a one in 10,000 risk that someone will develop cancer from exposure to the WTC (World Trade Center) pollutants, and this was only for a limited set of POCs (pollutants of concern)," the report states.

For exposure to air toxins, the EPA traditionally has defined the acceptable cancer odds as a one in 1 million, for the general public. Its regulation of occupational exposures are based on risk levels no greater than 1 in 100,000.

The OIG also is focused on the role the White House played in drafting the EPA's press releases on the fallout of the World Trade Center collapse.

A former EPA chief of staff "acknowledged that the content of the WTC press releases was heavily influenced by (President Bush's) Council on Environmental Quality," the OIG report states.

"Selected e-mails indicate CEQ dictated (to the EPA public information office) the content of early press releases - 100 percent of what CEQ added was added; 100 percent of what CEQ deleted was deleted," the report states.

The report does not say whether the EPA objected to the changes. Spokeswomen for the council and the EPA said it is not unusual for the White House to be involved in the drafting of public statements, especially on high-profile issues.

While the EPA declined comment on the ongoing investigation, Whitman has strongly defended the agency against other critics of its response to the New York City disaster.

She has pointed out that the EPA began monitoring the air in lower Manhattan within hours of the collapse and that many EPA officials provided scientific, engineering, public health and management expertise.

One scientist who was on the scene of the disaster said it is difficult to criticize the agency's decisions given the enormity of the job responding to the chaos.

"I don't think I would have done any better or any worse," said Paul Lioy, an environmental health scientist affiliated with Rutgers University and the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.

"We were just going from one place to another, one moment to another, trying to gather your wits in an event that shook the nation," Lioy said.

"This was a horrible learning experience."

Chris Bowman can be reached at (916) 321-1069 or cbowman@sacbee.com.

Copyright © The Sacramento Bee

Classroom Health Is Nothing to Sneeze At: NYSUT Conference Gives Cautionary Advice, Tips

By Liza Frenette
New York Teacher
March 12, 2003

http://www.nysut.org/newyorkteacher/2002-2003/030312health.html

Classrooms can be laboratories of swirling, bad air.

With mixed populations, and generalized and specialized use classrooms, the school environment can trigger allergies and respiratory illnesses, said Dr. Jacqueline Moline, co-chairwoman of the department of community medicine for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

"The more people in the room, the less ventilation," Moline said. "And closets were not meant to be used as classrooms." She spoke to an audience at the annual health and safety conference sponsored by New York State United Teachers in Albany this month.

Air can be contaminated with allergens, particulates, metals and Volatile Organic Compounds, the speaker said. These VOCs in the classroom air can come from glues, resin, particleboard, adhesives, pesticides and paints.

Moline said schools can be made healthier by developing a team approach to solving problems, including representation from local unions, parent associations and the State Education Department. It's important, she said, to have immediate notification of the school community when there's an outbreak of communicable diseases.

"An outbreak is three people or more with a disease," Moline said.

Some diseases common to school populations are conjunctivitis, impetigo, hepatitis A, ringworm, lice, chicken pox and viruses.

Gloves help. "If you see a kid with a nosebleed, the first thing you do is put your gloves on," Moline said. For playground duty, "those gloves should be in your pocket. It should be second nature."

Moline cited health and safety risks often faced by paraprofessionals - lifting, inadequate training and diapering special needs students, especially on floors.

The conference offered perspectives on different health and safety issues. NYSUT staffers Lynda Larson and Jim Henck held a workshop to clarify what student care tasks need to be done by a registered professional school nurse, and which need training, assessment and approval by the nurse, but can be done by others. As schools accommodate more special needs students, school nurses may have to deal with gastrostomy feeding, tube feedings, suctioning, respirator and ventilator care and ostomy care, to name a few.

Pigeon poop

The effects of mold, improper lighting, leaks and even pigeon droppings were aired in a session led by Joan Greenbaum of the Professional Staff Congress, representing academic and professional staff at the City University of New York.

Randy Smith of Lehman College, a PSC safety officer, told the story of a pigeon roof being erected on one college building to replace ineffective netting.

"We went to administrators after we had gathered facts on health issues of pigeon droppings, and NYSUT helped us with research," said Smith. "They were on the grounds, on the stairs, everywhere. After a struggle, administrators agreed to do something."

You have to be educated before you agitate and organize, Greenbaum said.

"It's the union's responsibility to remind management that it's their responsibility to provide a safe workplace," said Doug Cody, a member of the Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers.

The workshop included referalls to resources, such as the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health at www.nycosh.org or NYSUT health and safety at (800) 342-9810, or www.nysut.org/healthandsafety.

"We need to get more information on who to call next, because the school doesn't always respond," said Colleen McHeard, a middle school teacher from the Amsterdam Teachers Association.

Emergency Response: Nadler Says Workplaces Neglected In World Trade Center Dust Cleanup

By John Herzfeld
BNA Daily Environment Report
Tuesday, February 11, 2003

NEW YORK--Conditions in workplaces and other indoor spaces near the site of the destruction of the World Trade Center are still being neglected nearly a year and a half after the disaster, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Feb. 10.

Renewing previous assertions that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to assume its legally required leadership role in the cleanup, Nadler contended that EPA officials had "lied about knowing who is in charge" of cleaning up dust contamination in indoor spaces. At a news conference, he presented evidence he said showed that agency officials "have finally admitted" that EPA is legally responsible for the indoor cleanup.

When EPA announced an interagency cleanup plan in May 2002, Nadler maintained that the step was an overdue "reversal" of the agency's earlier deference to the city Health and Environmental Protection departments (91 DEN A-4, 5/10/02 ).

But EPA Region II Administrator Jane M. Kenny suggested then that the agency's delegation of specific responsibilities to the city did not mean that it had given up its leadership role.

At the news conference, Nadler presented testimony given by EPA Assistant Administrator Marianne Lamont Horinko at a Jan. 6 administrative law hearing on a challenge to the agency's December 2000 dismissal of Hugh Kaufman as an investigator in its ombudsman's office. In that testimony, Nadler said, Horinko "admitted under oath that the EPA is indisputably legally responsible for all hazardous material testing and remediation indoors after a terrorist attack."

Critics of the agency's response to the disaster have argued that EPA was not assuming its legally mandated role under the National Contingency Plan and a 1998 presidential decision directive (PDD 62) for responding to acts of terrorism. Nadler maintained that Horinko's testimony contradicted statements by EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman that the question of responsibility was "murky."

Nadler also said the city Department of Environmental Protection had mishandled its responsibilities after having been "illegally placed in charge" by EPA.

Presenting data obtained under a freedom-of-information request by the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project, Nadler said the city had received indoor environmental quality reports from only 218 out of 1,900 downtown buildings below Canal Street.

Even those replies to a Feb. 12, 2002, city request to landlords included many incomplete or inadequate reports, and DEP "has not issued a single citation" for failure to respond to the request, Nadler said. In one instance, he reported, a landlord's reply consisted of simply reporting that the building's windows had been closed during the disaster and there had been "a minimum" of dust infiltration.

Nadler also argued that many other buildings north of Canal Street and across the East River in Brooklyn had been subjected to the trade center dust plume but were not covered by any cleanup plan.

EPA Responds

In an EPA statement, Kenny denied that the agency's policies have stood in the way of proper cleanup. "As EPA has stated from the start, any indoor space--residential or commercial--that was impacted by the collapse of the World Trade Center, should have been properly cleaned using the techniques of wet wiping, wet mopping, and vacuuming with specially equipped HEPA vacuums," she said.

Preliminary results of a study the agency is conducting of those techniques "find them to be very effective in removing dust and debris, and reducing the risk from any residual dust becoming airborne," Kenny said. She added that EPA "has consistently recommended" professional cleaning for residential and commercial spaces that were "significantly impacted."

Restating the agency's position that "the long-term risk from exposure to residual dust from the World Trade Center is low," Kenny said EPA has been conducting an indoor cleanup program "to provide lower Manhattan residents with the issurance that their homes have been properly cleaned." Initial testing results found that asbestos levels for "only 17 of the nearly 1,600 apartments" in that program exceeded a "very stringent health standard" being applied, she said.

Kenny said EPA, together with the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had focused on residential cleanup "because lower Manhattan residents are most in need of assistance." She added that "families spend the majority of their time in their homes" and many households "had only limited ways to pay for cleanup services."

She also cited the availability of "a variety" of assistance programs for commercial establishments and private insurance held by many commercial building owners to cover cleanup costs. In addition, she said, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will investigate worker complaints.

Officials of the city DEP could not be reached for comment.

'Evasion and Delay.'

The eighth congressional district of New York, which Nadler represents, includes the trade center site, surrounding West Side communities, and part of Brooklyn. His complaints about EPA and city environmental response led to a Feb. 11, 2002, Senate field hearing where city officials pledged new steps to address the indoor air issue (29 DEN AA-1, 2/12/02).

Workplaces have been left out of the EPA cleanup plan without any apparent scientific and legal basis, charged Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a union and public health group. He said his group's inquiries to the agency "have been treated with evasion and delay bordering on contempt."

In the absence of regulatory pressure, some employers have "acted responsibly" to deal with contamination issues and others have not, Shufro said at the news conference. "We are here to demand that EPA revise its plan and include workplaces as a necessary and integral part of its program."

Problems in Downtown Manhattan

Arguing that downtown Manhattan continues to show signs of workplace contamination despite official assurances that the area's air is safe to breathe, Nadler was joined by union representatives complaining of inadequate workplace leanups, workers with lingering respiratory illness, and business owners who said their insurance recoveries have been blocked by EPA's position on the risks of the contamination.

"We cannot again bury our heads in the sand," Nadler said. "Just because we cannot necessarily see the contaminants of concern, that does not mean they aren't still there and does not mean we should go back to business as usual."

Among the workplaces where contamination remains a concern, the union representatives said, are the relocated New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a Manhattan community college, and several of the city's firehouses. "In the eyes of the world, we're heroes, but in EPA's eyes, we're nothing," complained Rudy Sanfilipo, a Uniformed Firefighters Association trustee.

Nadler further warned that failure to properly test and remediate the area will open the city and state to "tremendous future financial costs" from legal liability for occupational disease, as well as related lost productivity.

Effects of 9/11 Continue to Ripple Through Construction Ranks

By Jaan vanValkenburgh
New York Construction News - Cover Feature
February 2003

http://newyork.construction.com/NYCN/NY-Feb03/cover4_0203.htm

Memories of people jumping from the World Trade Center buildings kept John Graham up at night for months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America.

The New York City District Council of Carpenters health and safety instructor also suffered from difficult and pained breathing caused by chemical-laden dust he inhaled at the site. While his sleep has improved, his breathing remains labored and his voice raspy. He still faces a mix of depression, anxiety and irritability.

Graham knows his symptoms are typical of those suffered by construction workers at the World Trade Center the day of the attacks and afterwards. He worked at the site for eight months in the rescue and clean-up effort.

As a volunteer emergency medical technician, he also recognizes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

"Construction workers are feeling it," Graham said. But "macho construction workers are not going to tell you they cry in the shower."

Some of them are talking to Mt. Sinai School of Medicine doctors examining Sept. 11 site workers for psychological and physical ailments. The hospital's World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program began in fall 2001, and since then, more than half of the 2,500 workers examined have been found to have persistent upper respiratory inflammation.

A majority of the workers also suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Since the attacks, safety and health officials have been assessing how construction workers could have been better protected and, ultimately, prepared. Better breathing apparatus, onsite counseling, predisaster training among construction workers and shorter shifts are being discussed.

The first hurdle, however, may be determining the extent of the safety problems.

Safety measures taken during the rescue, retrieval and cleanup efforts clearly worked. No construction workers died, and there were few traditional, physical injuries.

Last spring, U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao said, "Three million work hours have been logged on a worksite like no other in our great nation under some of the most dangerous conditions imaginable. Yet, only 35 workers missed workdays due to injury, and, most importantly, no more lives were lost.

"American workers - from city, state and federal government agencies, trade associations, contractors and labor organizations - formed a partnership to reclaim this site and recover our fellow citizens. And, they've done so safely."

Still, at a recent meeting hosted by the nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, about two dozen union and safety leaders met to discuss what could have been done better.

Several aired frustration at what they described as a seemingly nationwide apathy regarding lung and psychological ailments stemming from Sept. 11.

Joseph "Chip" Hughes, director of Worker Education and Training for the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of the federal government's National Institutes of Health, said there is a general Sept. 11 fatigue, but "learning from what happened is really important."

Diane Stein, outreach coordinator for Mt. Sinai's WTC screening program, said even people in New York don't want to hear about the problems. She added that one possible way to raise awareness and get people better prepared for another terrorist attack is to start with something familiar and not only associated with terrorism, such as evacuation plans.

That's one angle NYCOSH is taking. Since Sept. 11, it has offered more building security and evacuation exercises.

Protecting emergency and construction workers from illness at the site of a future disaster, terrorism or not, is more complicated.

First, there is the issue of respirators, the first line of defense against dust and smoke. Not a lot of them were used at the World Trade Center, according to Bruce Lippy, director of the National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training, a Web site and database of training materials by NIEHS grantees. The clearinghouse specializes in hazardous waste work.

"Respirators were worn much like loose neckties, hanging below the neck," Lippy wrote in a January report on the use of respirators at the WTC site. He estimated that, at any given time, only between 30 percent and 50 percent of the rescue and recovery workers wore the masks.

At the NYCOSH meeting, union representatives said members weren't always trained in how or when to use them, and weren't fitted for them.

There are two ways to make sure a respirator fits. One is to blow smoke in the face of someone wearing one and see if he or she coughs. A better way is to scientifically measure how well it fits, as mandated by OSHA.

Lippy said respiratory fitness tests were not offered widely until 38 days after the WTC towers went down. Exceptions included Turner Construction and the Carpenters Union, which fitted respirators for workers within a week of the attacks.

Regardless, many workers chose not to wear them. Workers, many pulling 12-hour shifts, found them cumbersome and tiring.

"I really can't fault them if people are going to force them to wear them for 12 hours. That's really very tough," Lippy said.

Graham said respirators that covered the entire face, instead of the half-face respirators passed out, might have been better. They provide an easier fit.

However, Lippy said that, for the money, the half-face units were still best. He recommended half-face, negative pressure respirators with P-100 organic, vapor/acid cartridges, which was the type also recommended by OSHA and EPA.

Other methods of protecting workers' lungs could include shorter work hours in the heavily contaminated areas and creating well ventilated areas for various jobs.

Graham went to Mt. Sinai in the fall of 2001, while he was still working at the site. He said he was diagnosed with asthma, active airway disease and burned lungs. He also was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.

"I saw 12 people jump, at least," he added. "The horror was you almost had to watch them until impact, at which time you were sprayed with body fluids."

The images still haunt him. "You are worried about tomorrow for no reason," he said. It "makes you a little more disorganized. It's hard to concentrate."

He is getting better, thanks to time and counseling.

People going to the site to help were briefed beforehand to brace themselves for what they would encounter. Graham said that was helpful. He added that a debriefing afterward would have helped, too, where counselors would be present to observe and perhaps intervene.

All of this may be especially important for volunteers and construction workers not used to emergency sites.

"These construction workers were finding body parts," said Michael McCann, director of safety and ergonomics for The Center to Protect Workers' Rights, which is based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. "That's not usually part of a construction worker's job."

At the World Trade Center, safety measures were sometimes put off, particularly because long hours seemed justified as long as there was hope of finding survivors.

Even after it was clear there were only remains to find, the fever pitch of work remained, often with 12-hour shifts. Workers were tired, which is dangerous at any construction site.

"I think it would have been better if we had slowed down a little bit, taken care of the living," Graham said. But "nobody wanted to say the rescue was over."

NOTE: To learn more about or to find out if you are eligible to participate in Mt. Sinai's World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, call (888) 702- 0630.

Copyright © 2003, The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Safety Provisions in New Contract Will Set the Industry Standard

Track News
(Newsletter of the elected Track Division Committee of TWU Local 100)
January 6, 2003

http://www.twulocal100.org/members/departments/mainofway/
shownewsletter2.php?dnl2id=15

For the first time ever, TWU Local 100 members will have the right to challenge an order to work unsafe. The language is located on page 26 of the new contract proposal. For the first time ever, management has made a commitment to take disciplinary action against supervisors who fail to correct valid safety conditions. This contract language is monumental! We do not know of any other collective bargaining agreement in the nation which allows workers to challenge unsafe work orders. Outside railroads which are covered by the Federal Railroad Administration have the right to challenge unsafe work but that right is derived from Federal Law not from the collective bargaining agreement.

According to Joel Shufro, the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), the "safety and health language that Local 100 won is ground breaking" and the contract contains "many provisions that other unions should adopt." The importance of this agreement cannot be over emphasized.

Especially in light of the fact that we have suffered four fatalities in the last eighteen months. In addition to securing the right to challenge unsafe work in the contract, the Track Committee will continue to pursue enhanced safety measures through Albany. There have already been several meetings with the NYS Department of Labor regarding track Safety.

Recently, the Track Committee and the TWU Safety Department testified in front of the NYS Hazard Abatement Board on the inadequacies of New York City Transit's track safety program. Due to TWU's presentation the Hazard Abatement Board has called for public hearings on Transit worker safety, for the purpose of writing track safety standards into NYS Law.

It is our goal to continue pushing forward until NY State creates a legal standard for track flagging and 3rd rail safety which is enforceable under the law. The year 2003 appears to be very promising for improving safety for TWU Local 100 members.

Air of Uncertainty

Coverage of potential health problems near Ground Zero was slow to develop, as many news organizations simply accepted the reassurances of the EPA. The episode underscores the difficulty of covering questions with no clear answers.

By Susan Q. Stranahan
American Journalism Review
January/February 2003

http://216.167.28.193/Article.asp?id=2746

Susan Q. Stranahan is a freelance journalist in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. For 28 years, she wrote about environmental issues for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her stories were a major component in the Inquirer's coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting.

On the morning of 9/11, columnist Juan Gonzalez of New York's Daily News was in Brooklyn, covering the city's mayoral primary, when he heard about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He headed on foot toward lower Manhattan, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as the second tower collapsed. Arriving at Ground Zero, he began interviewing people. "It was pitch-black in lower Manhattan in the middle of the day," he remembers. "It was obvious there was a lot of pretty nasty stuff in the air." He would be the first to report on just how nasty it was.

Newsday's Laurie Garrett was on the Brooklyn Bridge when the towers collapsed. "You saw this massive amount of stuff coming down," she says. It struck her as odd that people were spitting out the dust and blowing their noses, but not coughing. She wondered why.

Christine Haughney, a 1999 Columbia University J-school grad who works as an editorial aide in the Washington Post's New York bureau, raced to the scene via subway. Almost instantly, she was coated with soot. Later, when Bureau Chief Michael Powell told her to follow the air pollution angle, she eagerly agreed. "It seemed a logical story," she says.

Andrew Schneider, deputy assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, listened carefully as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman proclaimed two days after the attack that "there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City." He'd seen photos of the scene and knew a lot about toxic materials. "What everybody was saying didn't make sense," he says.

In the first weeks and months after the disaster, questions about health concerns from the World Trade Center collapse took a back seat to reporting on global terrorism, heroic acts and the loss of life. As time wore on, however, it became the story of concern to tens of thousands of New Yorkers and others.

Yet coverage has been inconsistent, ranging from repeated reassurances that the air is safe to fearsome headlines about toxins and cancer. That disparity--along with early suspicions about bias and motives on the part of government and the media--left Manhattan residents distrustful of what they were told. And hungry for answers that may not be known for years.

Not since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size task of communicating complex information to a frightened public. As at TMI, officials in New York were loath to concede they were in the dark, and as a result, offered erroneous and misleading information about the situation. Like TMI, the best stories often lay hidden in inconsistent statements and arcane technical data--awaiting discovery by curious reporters.

All too often after 9/11, however, journalists simply accepted the party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched the lives of thousands. "This was as difficult an environmental health assignment as you can get," says Eric A. Goldstein, who tracks air-quality issues as head of the Natural Resources Defense Council's New York Urban Program. The subject was extremely complex, but it also was politically delicate. "How far should the media go in highlighting facts that raise uncomfortable ambiguities on health issues at a time when America seemed to be under attack?" For both reasons, says Goldstein, who followed government response and related news accounts, "it took a while [for the media] to get their bearings."

Jonathan Bennett of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a coalition of labor unions and worker safety activists, also tracked the coverage; he has been e-mailing news stories and government documents to more than 300 reporters since shortly after September 11. "A lot of important information hasn't been well communicated to the people who needed to have it," says Bennett. "The media in New York have not been particularly interested."

That view is shared by Alyssa Katz, editor of City Limits, a nonprofit magazine about New York City affairs. On 9/11, she watched as a giant plume of smoke passed over her Brooklyn house. "The whole neighborhood was raining paper and dust." As the months passed and health complaints among New Yorkers mounted, she thought her colleagues were missing an obvious story. Asked by an editor at The American Prospect to analyze the coverage for the magazine, her late-February article pulled no punches. "If government officials hoped to minimize fears that lower Manhattan was no longer a safe place to live or work, they had plenty of help from New York's media." The exception, she wrote, was Juan Gonzalez at the Daily News.

Public health experts also found in-depth coverage of the subject lacking. Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, says he found the New York Times' coverage initially to be soft. "In the early weeks, they were awfully reassuring. Their first reaction was to dismiss the possibility of asbestos."

"Reporters have to be sophisticated thinking through the motives of government officials," he adds. "Why did Christie Whitman say on day two that there was no asbestos hazards, a position at variance with her own agency's data?"

Landrigan, who was often interviewed on the health risks, thinks the Times' coverage improved as debate grew over the safety of returning to contaminated apartments. "Serious mistakes were made" in the haste to get people back into their homes, he believes. The premature return--and bungled advice from the city of New York on proper decontamination of those homes--might result in a few additional cases of cancer, he says. Otherwise, Landrigan believes, the risk of long-term health problems for those living and working in lower Manhattan is not high, "but it's not zero, either."

Clearly, everyone was maneuvering through uncharted territory. That includes environmental experts, public health authorities, government leaders and, of course, journalists.

"We have no precedent to turn to, no scientific model," says Newsday's prize-winning science and medical writer Laurie Garrett. Even so, she says, the subject is "a damn big story" that the media have been slow to pursue.

The New York Times' metro environment reporter Kirk Johnson agrees with Garrett on one point: "No one had ever been anywhere like this before." As a result, he says, "there's no huge base of knowledge to fall back on." For example, will short-term exposures like those that occurred near the World Trade Center produce health problems years later? No one knows.

Johnson says one principle dictated the Times' coverage--"To make sure we knew what we were talking about."

From the outset, the Times relied heavily on statements from federal authorities.

Three days after 9/11, the paper offered this assessment: "[T]ests of air and the dust coating parts of Lower Manhattan appeared to support the official view expressed by city, state and federal health and environmental officials: that health problems from pollution would not be one of the legacies of the attacks. Tests of air samples taken downwind of the smoldering rubble...disclosed no harmful levels of asbestos, lead or toxic organic compounds, officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday."

That was what the experts--and the Times--continued to repeat long afterward.

Trouble was, months after the terrorist attacks, thousands of lower Manhattan residents and workers were hacking and wheezing; their homes and offices were loaded with powdery residues; private testing of building interiors showed worrisome amounts of asbestos; and they just weren't buying that line--no matter how many times they heard it. "There was a real disconnect between what government was saying and what a lot of people were experiencing," says the NRDC's Goldstein.

Consider stories published over three days in 2002. On September 29, Kirk Johnson transported Times readers back a half-century to a six-day air-pollution siege in Manhattan that bore an uncanny resemblance to conditions immediately after the terrorist attacks. "A dry, wheezing, watery-eyed cough became common," he wrote. "Smoke and haze drifted across the region."

Johnson's anecdotal lead that Sunday was intended to illustrate "how little science knew" about the health effects of air pollution on New Yorkers in the 1950s. "If air pollution victims in 1953 were in the dark because they couldn't know," wrote Johnson, "some Manhattan residents now are perhaps just as in the dark because of what they cannot accept."

The next day, Newsday launched a two-part series, starting with "City Struggles to Contend with Widespread WTC Cough," written by Garrett. (Delthia Ricks wrote the other story, "Assessing the Scope of WTC Ailments.") Although both articles were full of caveats about what science didn't know about the cause of the respiratory afflictions, they provided fascinating insights into the chemistry of the dust and its impact on the human lung. Garrett also reported that the EPA's air-testing program, designed to measure asbestos levels or other toxins, "may be inappropriately focused." Microscopic bits of glass may pose a far greater health hazard than the experts originally believed, she wrote.

The Times and Newsday stories are just one example of widespread disparities in tone and substance. A review of nearly 200 news stories written about health implications for those near Ground Zero reveals other significant differences--and some major lapses. On occasion, reporters forgot journalism's First Commandment: If it doesn't ring true, figure out why. Often, they didn't recognize another commandment, inherent to the World Trade Center health stories: Some questions have no immediate answers, and that's news, too.

About 10 days after the World Trade Center attacks, the Daily News' Juan Gonzalez got a phone call from Joel Kupferman, head of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, a shoestring public-interest firm.

Kupferman told Gonzalez he had had dust samples from near Ground Zero analyzed by two private companies. The tests showed levels of asbestos up to five times higher than federal safety guidelines. They also detected significant amounts of fiberglass. At the time, federal and city officials were urging residents and workers to return to their homes and offices near Ground Zero. Schools in the neighborhood were set to reopen. Was Gonzalez interested?

Kupferman's information confirmed Gonzalez's suspicions. "My gut instincts told me the [EPA] statements just couldn't be based on any kind of accurate assessment," he says. "I wanted to look a little more." So did Kupferman; he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the EPA's testing data.

On September 28, Gonzalez detailed Kupferman's findings in a column headlined "Health Hazards in Air Worry Trade Center Workers." Five days later, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began posting outdoor air-quality measurements around lower Manhattan on their Web sites. In a press release, Whitman said: "Our data show that contaminant levels are low or nonexistent, and are generally confined to the Trade Center site. There is no need for concern among the general public...." By then, tens of thousands of Financial District workers and thousands more residents had returned to their dust-filled offices and homes.

By October 9, when Gonzalez again took up the asbestos topic, the Times, Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Daily News (in its news columns) had also tackled rising public concerns about air quality. The AP and the Daily News quoted federal officials saying the levels of asbestos and other contaminants near Ground Zero posed no health risks. Newsweek, however, reported there was "more asbestos at [the] disaster site than previously revealed," according to an independent air-quality testing firm. The magazine raised the prospect that the EPA was using less-sophisticated testing equipment than the private contractors and thus was not detecting pulverized fibers prevalent at Ground Zero.

The Times' Susan Saulny and Andrew C. Revkin, a health-science reporter, wrote on October 6: "The Environmental Protection Agency has tested the air in Lower Manhattan more than 1,000 times and has concluded that it does not show dangerous levels of contamination." However, they added, "The intense fear of contaminated air has spread throughout downtown and taken on a life of its own, despite repeated assurances by the authorities, becoming one of the more unexpected and unmanageable side effects of the trade center disaster."

Gonzalez's October 9 column picked up on Newsweek's lead. "Asbestos contamination inside buildings near the World Trade Center site may be far worse than government officials have reported...," he wrote. By now, he had the results of the same private toxicology tests Newsweek cited. Those tests were performed for the owner of two office buildings near Ground Zero, and the private monitors were finding asbestos the feds were missing. According to EPA spokeswoman Mary Mears, those tests involved vacuuming fibers out of carpets; there is no requirement for the EPA to perform this level of extraction. All health guidelines, the agency notes, are based on ambient air levels of asbestos.

"Even as they were reassuring the public," Gonzalez told his readers, "EPA officials distributed respirators late last week to their employees in the Federal Building...a few blocks from the Trade Center site."

Two days later, the Times published "Air Quality: Contaminants Below Levels for Long-Term Concerns," by Johnson and Revkin. Independent air tests commissioned by the Times concluded that "outdoor street level air in the vicinity of the trade center site does not contain poisons or toxic substances, especially lead and asbestos, in levels sufficient to raise long-term public health concern." Those findings "essentially mirrored" EPA findings, the paper reported.

The newspaper decided to do its own testing, Johnson said later, because "we had so many people calling me and the Times saying they didn't believe what the government [or anyone else] was reporting."

However, he adds, "I don't know that that reassured anybody."

Throughout his reporting, Johnson says, he tried to clearly differentiate the two groups at risk: those at Ground Zero and those a short distance away. "The scientific evidence does support a cautiously optimistic outcome for the vast majority of people who were not exposed for extended periods at Ground Zero," says Johnson. "That is a wholly separate thing from Ground Zero.... [And] that's where journalism has gotten in trouble on this." (Gonzalez also wrote about both areas, and made distinctions.)

At the Daily News in late October, Gonzalez was eyeing 800 pages of raw data, the response to Joel Kupferman's FOIA request. The numbers showed high levels of contaminants--PCBs, benzene, lead and chromium--at monitoring sites around lower Manhattan, as well as at Ground Zero. Kupferman was itchy to get the data out to the public; Gonzalez wanted more time to assess the numbers, which seemed at odds with everything the EPA was saying.

Uncertain what to do, Gonzalez sought advice from his boss, then-Metro Editor Richard Pienciak, who as an AP reporter had covered the Three Mile Island accident and many environmental and pollution issues. Pienciak reviewed the reams of data and helped Gonzalez make sense of the significance of the numbers.

Gonzalez led the October 26 Daily News with a column on the high readings documented in the FOIA results. The headline: "Toxic Nightmare at Disaster Site."

"That unleashed a firestorm," says Gonzalez, who adds, "I wasn't too happy with the headline. It was a little too tabloidy."

EPA and city officials immediately attacked the column as irresponsible and a misinterpretation of testing data. Five days later, the News published an op-ed article by the EPA's Whitman defending her agency and saying the high readings cited by Gonzalez were taken out of context.

As the controversy flared, Gonzalez says he felt the heat from inside, too. "From that day on, the whole attitude toward the story changed. I did several more columns, but every one of them was highly scrutinized." He was assigned to a variety of editors.

Edward Kosner, editor in chief at the Daily News, says the change of editors and closer scrutiny were warranted because of the "investigative" nature of Gonzalez's columns, especially in light of complaints from City Hall and the EPA. "At the same time they were beefing, we wanted to make sure that our stories were as double-riveted as they could be."

Did he have concerns about Gonzalez's take on the data? "Maybe more interpretation was put on those readings than perhaps they deserved," he says. "Maybe [the high readings] were temporary spikes," and not reflective of general conditions--the point made by Whitman in her op-ed. In the end, however, Kosner's view of the column was reflected in its placement. "It was a good story. That's why we put it on page one."

Gonzalez stuck with the subject, learning as he went. "There are no federal safety levels for most of these contaminants," he says. "The EPA tried to portray that they had the situation under control, when the reality was, they didn't."

The agency should have leveled with people about possible risks, he says, "and let them make up their own minds. When you tell people there's nothing to worry about and [that] everything is OK, you're lying to them. To me, that was the big problem."

The same day Daily News readers were greeted by the "Toxic Nightmare" column, New York Times readers saw this story: "Air quality in Lower Manhattan has gradually improved since the early days.... But at certain times, under certain conditions--usually for brief periods--the bad air still returns.... [M]ost people need not worry."

At the Times, which won four Pulitzers for its terrorism coverage, reporters Johnson and Revkin worked their sources to better understand the complexities. "It came down to what we know and what we don't know," says Revkin. "Many times in situations like this, leaders, elected officials and the media try to portray things we don't know. We were, I think, bending over backwards to be sure we were reporting a risk only if we knew it, whereas others, I feel rather strongly, were flipping it the other way."

Asked for an example, Revkin cites the Daily News. "Some of the headlines were unnecessarily alarmist and not supported by the facts."

Gonzalez has his own assessment of the competition's coverage. "The Times was and has continued to be total apologists for the EPA on just about everything."

Somewhere in the middle lurked some great, unwritten stories. Yes, as the Times repeatedly reported, air quality in lower Manhattan met federal health and environmental standards. In reality, however, those standards had no track record; they had been hastily cobbled together after 9/11 by scientists estimating the levels of risk. That whole process cried out for detailed coverage.

Yes, Gonzalez had a lot of frightening numbers from indoor and outdoor air measurements, and made the most of the conflicts between that data and official statements. But for people deciding whether to return or stay away, the numbers meant little without more explanation.

In the end, readers must have wondered if the two newspapers were covering the same event.

The NRDC's Eric Goldstein thinks most of the media were slow to ask hard questions. "The early pronouncements by the EPA administrator [that the air was safe] determined much of the way the media thought about this issue for months," he says.

He also believes the media and government officials underestimated how sophisticated the public can be. "Most Americans can accept some uncertainty on complex health issues," says Goldstein. "But they really get distressed when they sense government agencies aren't leveling with them or are trying to manage the news."

Many came to suspect that the official line of touting the good news was rooted in a desire by government and media bosses to get life, and the city's battered economy, back to normal. The EPA's Mears says: "The goal was to get the city back to normal, but it was never at the expense of the health of the people of New York. I never heard any conversation 'We have to reopen downtown; the hell with the [monitoring] information.' If our monitors had shown anything of concern, we surely would not have pushed for a reopened Manhattan."

Did the hometown media share that same craving? Newsday's Laurie Garrett thinks they might have.

"Every media outlet in town took a huge hit financially," she says. "It's hard for any news organization that's based on advertising revenues to resist a certain level of boosterism for the community that's the base of their advertising. Did that directly affect editorial policy at Newsday? I didn't see it happen, and I never had anybody say to me they were thinking that way."

Another, subtler, force might also have been at work: reporters' own hunger for life pre-9/11.

"For many of us living in New York, there was a psychological effect. Either we became very fearful, or we became New York-proud, defiant and angry," says Garrett. "I think it would be naïve in the extreme to think that our reporting would have been unaffected by that experience."

Garrett sees another problem in the media's coverage: The good guy/bad guy paradigm didn't fit. "The longer you follow the World Trade Center [health] story, you realize you can't point to the EPA and say these guys were terrible and negligent. It doesn't play out in that obvious fashion," she says. "You can't point to the activists and say, 'You guys are taking advantage of this catastrophe.'... Everybody is equally misfocused.

"We just aren't good in the media where there's no clear enemy but rather just a disturbing finding. Uncertainty is something reporters don't like to deal with."

In mid-January 2002, the out-of-town media jumped on the story. What had been largely a local issue now moved to the national stage, as reporters from St. Louis and Los Angeles detailed the fears and doubts afflicting many residents of lower Manhattan and highlighted the conflicting assessments of environmental risks. Some in New York welcomed the newcomers' arrival. But it also fed suspicions that the hometown media had taken a walk on the story.

"It was really people from out of town who were doing the best stories," says Marilena Christodoulou, then-president of the Stuyvesant High School Parents' Association, which at the time was locked in a bitter battle with the city's Board of Education over cleanup at the prestigious school near the World Trade Center. The school reopened a month after 9/11. "That gives you the impression that somehow there had been pressure put on the editors of the New York newspapers to keep it quiet--some misplaced patriotic interests or something."

The Los Angeles Times' Josh Getlin wrote of New Yorkers' brewing distrust of official claims on air quality, especially as attention turned to indoor pollution levels in homes and schools.

With a headline that screamed tabloid (except for its length), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch told Sunday readers: "NY Officials Underestimate Danger; 1 in 10 people exposed could be at risk of death, researchers say; Health authorities still insist that nearby homes, offices are safe; Hidden dangers lurk in the dust."

Andrew Schneider's 2,800-word January 13 article noted that government teams were using 20-year-old testing methods to assess asbestos levels. Private testing performed for labor unions, tenant groups, contractors and others used more sophisticated equipment and found dangerously high levels of asbestos inside buildings yet to be decontaminated, he wrote. Schneider quoted one of the EPA's own about the implications. "For every asbestos fiber EPA detected, the new methods used by the outside experts found nine," said Cate Jenkins, a senior EPA chemist in Washington, who became something of a media celebrity for her outspokenness. "This is too important a difference to be ignored if you really care about the health of the public."

Schneider contrasted the EPA's performance in lower Manhattan to its actions in Libby, Montana, where asbestos contamination led the EPA to declare the town a Superfund site in 2002 and institute extensive decontamination efforts to rid homes and the community of the fibers. In New York, the EPA wanted no part of indoor testing or cleanups--for the moment, at least.

About three weeks later, Schneider reported that some dust from the trade center was "as caustic as liquid drain cleaner." The alkaline dust burns moist tissue such as throats, eyes and nasal passages, and could explain the rash of respiratory problems afflicting New Yorkers, he wrote. Early warnings from the U.S. Geological Survey about the dust's toxicity had been ignored by other federal agencies, Schneider reported.

As they had with Gonzalez's column, EPA officials criticized Schneider's stories, saying he misrepresented the data and sensationalized the health implications. "I was disturbed and frustrated," says spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow, who complained to Schneider's editors.

On February 8, the New York Times' Kirk Johnson also addressed at length the uncertainty plaguing lower Manhattan, profiling 5-year-old Phoebe Kaufman and her parents, who worried about returning home amid conflicting reports on health risks. "There's no one to turn to" for information, said Phoebe's mother, Elizabeth Berger.

"This being New York, the diversity of conclusions is boundless," wrote Johnson. "Some people see downtown as a toxic nightmare, a kind of Manhattan Love Canal that has permanently poisoned the area's buildings and apartments with asbestos or chemicals. Others believe the risks are overblown or nonexistent."

Johnson described the "war of data and interpretation," with residents caught in the backwash of conflicting claims about air quality and safety. Pronouncements of air safety have not been disproved by the more than 10,000 samples gathered by the EPA, he wrote, but added that some residents and physicians distrust those findings. "[N]o answer seems certain, scientifically airtight, or obvious."

In early May, amid growing political and public pressure, the EPA reversed itself and announced it would lead the effort to test and clean an estimated 30,000 apartments in lower Manhattan. The EPA's Bellow explained the about-face: "It was certainly not a political decision. It was a decision based on a combination of looking at the science and the public need, and need includes people's concerns."

The day after the EPA's announcement, a Wall Street Journal story proclaimed "Buck-Passing Delayed EPA in 9/11 Cleanup." Reporter Jim Carlton's account began: "What took the Environmental Protection Agency eight months to assume responsibility for potential asbestos problems in homes in lower Manhattan...?" Carlton described how federal officials handed over responsibility to the city, which in turn delegated testing and cleanup to building owners and residents. He also provided new details about discrepancies in test results when electron microscopes were used to analyze dust versus the older method recommended by city health officials.

Over the next several months, preliminary research results began to document (but not explain) illnesses afflicting not only rescue workers but others outside Ground Zero. Studies found elevated rates of physical and emotional symptoms among faculty and staff at Stuyvesant High School, for example. Dozens of other inquiries are under way, and long-term health monitoring programs are being organized.

In late August, Newsday's Garrett raised a new question about those potentially at risk. Satellite photos taken on 9/11 by NASA showed a plume of dust engulfing Brooklyn. Garrett wrote that despite this, federal attention has focused only on lower Manhattan. Brooklyn's 2.4 million residents could also be in danger, she noted.

By the time the one-year anniversary stories began appearing last fall, the "toxic legacy" of the World Trade Center disaster was a prominent theme. The L.A. Times' Maggie Farley wrote that a "toxic cocktail containing many times the legal maximum levels of cancer-causing agents lingers everywhere." Newsweek observed that "the health impact on workers at the site and on lower Manhattan residents remains largely unknown."

The New York Times wrote about the impending publication of two medical studies documenting cases of "respiratory disability" among New York City firefighters in a September 10 story. The article described the potential forced early retirements of as many as 500 firefighters who had been exposed to dense clouds of dust, smoke and fumes at the World Trade Center.

In an article published in The American Prospect in late October, Laurie Garrett explored a theme that has been largely ignored by other media. "Health and environmental activists have focused their fears on the enemies they know," Garrett wrote, "asbestos and PCBs." Early results from the EPA's indoor testing show only 1 percent of the samples exceeded federal limits for regulated pollutants, she wrote.

But what if real threats lie in contamination by other enemies--chemicals and particulates for which there are no standards? "The most immediate and inescapable lesson...is that the regulatory framework in which environmental problems are addressed in the United States is probably too narrowly conceived to be useful in the face of events of the scale and complexity of the 9-11 disaster," Garrett wrote.

The same can be said of the journalistic framework. On some issues, no amount of interviews or digging will produce a conclusion. Is the uncertainty any less newsworthy than facts? Absolutely not--but only if readers know that the reporter has done the requisite research and still has come up empty.

Environmental officials got into trouble in the aftermath of 9/11 by providing assurances that later rang hollow in the public's ear. The media's credibility also was jeopardized because what people were reading bore little resemblance to what they were seeing with their own eyes. Here was a case where the public would far rather accept uncertainty than palliatives.

Ask the reporters who have followed the health issue for their predictions on how the story will end, and the responses are as diverse as the coverage.

"I think it's going to fade away," predicts the Times' Andrew Revkin.

Andrew Schneider disagrees. "This is a story that has to be followed." If the post-9/11 health debate teaches us anything, Schneider says, it is that "things have changed. The regulations, unfortunately, have not."

Who will be proven right?

Says Garrett: "We won't know the answer for a couple of decades."

Copyright 2002, American Journalism Review