Ground Zero air study shows a 'chemical factory'

[BOBDN]

The latest from the Star Ledger on the health threat the Bush administration decided to lie to New York about.

Ground Zero air study shows a 'chemical factory'

 

[rudder]

And the crazy thing had all those workers digging through the rubble known about the dangers, they would have still dug through the rubble. I think most took precautions viewing from the photos. I mean you have a building with ceiling tiles, computers, untold plastics, and who knows what else that was a smoldering rubble. Anyone with a little common sense would know that is something you don't want to breathe in.

 

[BOBDN]

I edit to add:

We were typing at the same time rudder.

A question about your post. You mention the workers. What of the millions of people who live and work in lower Manhattan being told the air was safe for their return before the EPA had any info to base their statement on?

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No one is interested? No one defending the Bush administration forcing the EPA to LIE about air quality at Ground Zero and in lower Manhattan?

It seems the spin machine is trying make this go away. But the fact remains the Bush administration told the EPA to publish statements about the air quality in lower Manhattan after 9/11 WITHOUT THE INFORMATION THEY NEEDED TO BASE THOSE STATEMENTS ON!

NEW YORK -- Rescue workers, volunteers and others close to Ground Zero in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, were exposed to a veritable "chemical factory" of dangerous pollutants, according to a study released yesterday during a national gathering of the American Chemical Society.

The lead author of the study, appearing with another leading scientist studying air quality in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, said those same pollutants posed little health threat to New Yorkers and New Jerseyans away from where the Twin Towers collapsed.

The study found levels of very fine particles -- cancer-causing pollutants, invisible shards of glass and sulfuric acids -- capable of penetrating the lungs at levels never seen by the researchers. They had conducted 7,000 similar tests worldwide, including ones near the oil fires after the 1991 Gulf War, volcanic eruptions and global dust storms.

Conditions would have been "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in adjacent buildings, said the lead author, Thomas Cahill, a professor of physics and atmospheric science at the University of California, Davis.

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers sent a massive cloud of pulverized concrete into the air, but the study focused on the stubborn fires at Ground Zero that burned until mid-December 2001 while rescue and salvage operations continued.

The tests were conducted during October 2001, a mile from the site high on a rooftop. Both scientists said the plume of pollutants rose quickly, greatly reducing the risk to people living off the World Trade Center site or walking city streets. The extremely high readings appeared only on days when the wind was blowing directly at the test site.

The concerns voiced by Cahill about the fearful level of pollutants did little to dispel a growing controversy about whether the federal Environmental Protection Agency did its job of protecting citizens in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

The EPA warned that rescue workers must wear respirators or risk serious consequences. But a report released last month by the agency's own inspector general said the EPA didn't have the data to support its contention a week after the attacks that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe.

The same report charged that White House officials instructed the agency to be less alarming and more reassuring to the public. Former EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has adamantly denied her agency downplayed health risks and said the White House never ordered her to lie about air quality.[/b]

Whitman said yesterday that science has continued to support EPA contentions that workers needed to wear respirators and visitors with health problems should probably stay away, but that the rest of the city had little to fear. She said EPA testing also showed high spikes of pollutants, based on wind shifts, but they always dissipated rapidly.

"The agency is getting blamed for being right, which is kind of ironic," she said. "There has never been a subsequent study that disproved what agency scientists said all along."

Ed Robinson, an employee of a demolition company, Mazzocchi Wrecking of East Hanover, N.J., that arrived at Ground Zero on the afternoon of Sept. 11, said he didn't get the message about dangerous air in the early days.

But he and co-worker, Ed King, said all workers on the site were under strict orders after about two days to wear respirators. They said they complied, but conceded they had seen others who didn't. Countless photographs taken during the rescue operation document the uneven use of respirators.

Both demolition workers said they experienced no early health problems but have begun to wonder about their exposure in the early days.

"We were walking around with all that dust, and who knows what was in it?" Robinson said. "Will we get asbestosis? Yeah, I worry about that."

Cahill and Paul Lioy, associate director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, said it is too early to determine precisely what the long-term health effects will be for people working at Ground Zero who failed to wear respirators.

Lioy said it was good news that there weren't an enormous number of "acute" cases of lung damage in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. One study traced "Ground Zero cough," a condition suffered by hundreds of workers, firefighters and volunteers to alkaline dust particles from pulverized concrete that irritated the throat but did not enter the lungs.

Still, a study by Mount Sinai Medical Center, which has begun to track long-term health concerns related to Ground Zero exposure, found that half the initial 250 participants suffered persistent lung or sinus symptoms a year later.

The scientists at the news conference yesterday -- who are not health-care professionals -- seemed to grow exasperated with persistent media questioning about whether there would be long-term effects from exposure to Ground Zero pollutants.

"No one can come away with a simple answer," Lioy said. "I apologize for that, but it just isn't going to happen."