|
For an index
to all NYCOSH in the News articles, click
here.
Emergency
Response: Nadler Says Workplaces Neglected In World Trade Center
Dust Cleanup
By John Herzfeld
BNA Daily Environment Report
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/DEN.NSF/3404b46f853d5cc985256b57005ac042
/5cd683c803f882ca85256cca000cb9f9?OpenDocument
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.
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
This page was last
updated on February 11, 2003.
|
