No, not Al Gore's movie. I'm talking about the 9/11 clean-up ... or, more accurately, the cover-up about the clean-up. Discover Magazine has a lengthy article about it in the current issue, also available online. Thirty thousand people or more may have lifelong health problems from exposure to toxic dust from the collapse of the towers. Many of those people were told the dust was safe, or left to clean it up themselves, or told that a simple painter's dust mask was adequate protection.
Initially, the New York City Department of Health (NYCDOH) took the lead in implementing an indoor cleanup program, which placed the responsibility for asbestos removal directly on landlords and residents themselves, in direct violation of city, state, and federal laws and at an enormous potential health risk.
Nina, for example, returned to her Tribeca apartment a week after 9/11. She found the entire place salted with what appeared to be a fine coating.
“This stuff goes through clothes, cracks, everything,” says Nina.
In the mail, she received a letter from the NYCDOH instructing her how to clean her apartment: Use a wet rag and use a High Efficiency Particulate Airfilter vacuum. (A study cited in the EPA’s OIG report shows that most residents failed to follow cleaning instructions appropriately.) Only trained, respirator-equipped professionals should conduct asbestos cleanup.¹ Shortly after returning to her apartment, Nina developed crippling headaches and respiratory problems—troubles she never had before.
It wasn't just that New Yorkers were not informed; New Yorkers were lied to. First they were told they were safe, when it was known they weren't; then they were told they should perform hazardous cleanup themselves, with inadequate equipment and no protection.
Now where else have we heard of that happening...? Or perhaps the better question is, is there any area in which faith-based policy and pravda² have NOT trumped scientific accuracy and truth in the policies of the Bush administration?
Yet some leaders are speaking up for sickened New Yorkers. Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Vito Fossella of New York introduced the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which would expand the current health programs for first responders, area residents, office workers, and students. New York representative Jerrold Nadler tirelessly champions decisive action on behalf of New Yorkers who are still susceptible to toxins.
“We have to clean this up; it was never done properly,” says Nadler, who also says cleanup efforts could run several billion dollars, but there is no exact figure because nobody knows how extensive the contamination is and if it extends to Brooklyn as well.
Because adequate testing has yet to be conducted, nobody knows for certain just how toxic Lower Manhattan remains, but there are plenty of indicators that the 9/11 attacks are still dismantling the downtown infrastructure. Two former Deutsche Bank buildings downtown will soon be demolished as a direct result of 9/11 contamination, and more demolitions are expected.
“To clean it up, it costs between $10,000 and $20,000 per apartment,” Nadler says about the current price of adequate cleaning. “Are you going to ask a resident to pay that?”
Apparently so, since the City of New York, under Mayor Rudy Guiliani, effectively already did when it left the responsibility for toxic cleanup of homes and businesses to the residents and the business owners. And by the look of things, it appears anyone who lives or works in Lower Manhattan may still be at risk.
The moral of the story, or one moral at any rate: Maybe you don't have to be able to get toxic materials into the country to build a dirty bomb. All you need is a sufficiently destructive event where large amounts of toxic materials already are. And in any major city, especially in cities with large numbers of buildings constructed before the health dangers of materials like asbestos, dioxins and PCBs were fully known ... that may turn out to be pretty much everywhere.
[1] Studies of the composition of the dust and the gas plume from the original collapse and from the smouldering wreckage pile have found, among other constituents of the dust: glass fibers, pulverized fiberglass, cement dust, chrysotile asbestos (an estimated 500 to 1000 tons of asbestos was used in the construction of the towers), vermiculite, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, polychlorinated dibenzofurans, barium, silicon dust and arsenic. The downwind plume included benzene, chromium, beryllium, cadmium, mercury, lead, and sulfuric acid (among others).
[2] Pravda is, as many people will know, the title of one of the two major journalistic mouthpoieces of the former Soviet Union (the other being Tass). Somewhat less people may know that the title is officially translated into English as "Truth". Probably rather less than that, though, may be aware that this translation isn't quite accurate. A better translation of the exact meaning of pravda, I am informed, would be "correctness", or, more directly, "official truth". If something is pravda, it isn't necessarily true. But you'd better be prepared to publicly accept it as true.
