Terrorism's Legacy

More than four years after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (WTC), lower Manhattan residents like Craig Hall still don't know whether their homes harbor toxic dust from the twin towers' collapse. Many, though probably not all, of the homes in the area were carefully cleaned after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Residents worry, however, whether their homes have been recontaminated, possibly through dust recirculated through ventilation systems. They are anxious about the potential effects of tainted dust on their own health and the health of their children.

Hall, who lives in Manhattan's Battery Park City with his three young children, is among thousands of New Yorkers eager for the Environmental Protection Agency to check their condos, co-ops, and rental units for residual toxic dust from the WTC collapse. EPA released its plan to do that in November 2005 after nearly two years of development (C&EN, Dec. 5, 2005, page 44). The agency is preparing to sample dust in many lower Manhattan homes and, where necessary, conduct cleanups. EPA will use $7 million provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to carry out this effort.

But activists, including Hall, who is president of the WTC Residents Coalition, consisting of tenant associations and boards of condo and co-op buildings, are telling their neighbors not to sign up for EPA's program. Hall calls EPA's plan "a waste of taxpayers' money" that will give false assurances to those who have their dwellings tested.

Hall and other activists, as well as a U.S. senator and representative, maintain that the EPA plan is unacceptable.

For one thing, EPA's plan is designed not to find residual contamination, activists say. Kimberly Flynn, co-coordinator of 9/11 Environmental Action-an organization of residents, parents of school-aged children, and environmental advocates-explains: "The EPA program is unscientific because it uses inappropriate testing methods and protocols that will systematically underestimate indoor contamination and will result in a long stream of inaccurate data and deceptive findings. Wrong methods give you wrong results."

Many Brooklynites are clamoring for testing of their homes, as are those living in areas of lower Manhattan not covered by the plan. They say they need the testing because for months after the terrorist attack, their residences were downwind of the smoldering Ground Zero pile and the trucks and barges used to haul away WTC rubble. Unions are angry that EPA will not sample dust in offices and other workplaces. And at least one resident of Chinatown has accused EPA of racism for excluding her Manhattan neighborhood from the testing.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), calls EPA's plan "wholly and patently inadequate." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) says, "It ignores many of the concerns of residents and workers who experienced the fallout from the collapse of the World Trade Center firsthand."

Says Hall, "Surely EPA should be looking in all places that one would expect to find WTC contaminants and close this issue out once and for all."

The agency's final plan also perplexed a technical panel advising EPA on the test-and-clean program. Members of the agency's WTC Expert Technical Review Panel, which was first convened in 2004 to guide the agency in drawing up the test-and-clean scheme, last month refused to endorse the agency's final version of that plan (C&EN, Dec. 19, 2005, page 36).

"I can't tell my neighbors to participate," said Marc Wilkenfeld, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and member of the panel, at the group's final meeting in New York City on Dec. 13, 2005. "This is a very, very big mistake."

Most panel members indicated that EPA had ignored their advice. For instance, Jeanne M. Stellman, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University, said, "I don't think what we've said has been absorbed." She added, "I feel like I've wasted my time."

Much of the panel's criticism of the plan zeroed in on EPA's use of an approach that the panel had consistently rejected. The program will analyze dust collected in homes for "contaminants of potential concern," including lead and asbestos. If high levels of these contaminants are found in a dwelling, EPA will conduct a cleanup.

Lead is widely found in older, indoor urban environments-lead-based paint is a likely source-several panel members noted. They agreed that the testing program is likely to detect high levels of lead and trigger cleanup regardless of the source of the contamination. Panelist Steven Markowitz, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, City University of New York, said the agency's plan assumes that contamination came from WTC unless it can be specifically attributed to another source.

EPA's plan will transform a program aimed at checking for WTC dust into a lead cleanup effort, said panel member Paul Lioy, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Lioy hopes the agency will reconsider its final plan. EPA needs some degree of assurance that any high levels of lead it finds came from WTC, he said, so the money it has will be spent on cleaning up contamination from the terrorist attack.

EPA, with guidance from the panel of experts, had proposed using the presence of slag wool, an insulating material, to distinguish between dust from WTC and ubiquitous urban pollution. The agency sought peer review of this proposed strategy. But criticism from reviewers "gave us little choice" but to drop plans to use slag wool as a "signature" for WTC contamination, said E. Timothy Oppelt, the director of EPA's National Homeland Security Research Center in Cincinnati.

"Much to our dismay, that review came out quite negatively," said Oppelt, who has served as interim chairman of the panel since 2004.

Panel member Gregory Meeker, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, said EPA did not carefully consider the remarks of the peer reviewers. He said four of the six reviewers agreed that slag wool could serve as a marker for WTC contamination, the fifth disagreed, and the sixth suggested it possibly could. Panelist Morton Lippman, professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, said the peer review indicated that EPA needs to do more scientific work to support the use of a signature.

Meeker expressed dismay that EPA plans to collect dust samples and not include a check for slag-wool fibers, even if their presence does not trigger a cleanup.

Lippman said that, by implementing its plan as presented, the agency would "spend money and walk away from the problem." Peter W. Gautier, commander of the Coast Guard's Gulf Strike Team and a panelist, said the proposal "seems expedient." But in emergency responses, "what's expedient is not usually the best" course of action, he said.

Two basic problems beset the agency's final cleanup program, said panel member David M. Newman, an industrial hygienist for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety & Health. One is that the plan is scientifically flawed. A second is that residents have no incentive to participate because the plan is flawed, Newman said.

Stellman agreed that EPA faces a major obstacle because the plan lacks the necessary "community buy-in" that would prompt people to volunteer for testing of their homes. In addition, people who participate in the testing plan as finalized by EPA would be left with "immense questions" as to whether their homes are truly free of hazardous levels of WTC dust, said panelist David J. Prezant, deputy chief medical officer for the New York Fire Department.

Micki Siegel de Hernandez, director of health and safety for the Communication Workers of America's District One in New York and a labor liaison to the panel, said the plan was designed to find as little WTC contamination as possible and to clean up as little as possible. She criticized the plan's reliance on building owners and managers to volunteer for testing of ventilation systems. To protect public health, EPA should require owners and managers to participate, she added.

In response to the panelists' criticism, Oppelt said EPA would reconsider the peer reviewers' comments on the use of slag wool as a signature for WTC contamination. "We gave up too soon. We got it wrong," he said.

Although EPA will reopen this one aspect of the plan, it will not expand the testing program, Oppelt said.

The agency won't do testing in other neighborhoods because it lacks data suggesting that homes there are contaminated with WTC dust, he said. Even though dust and smoke from the twin towers' collapse blew over Brooklyn, there is no documentation that outdoor areas of this borough were coated with fallout from the plume; thus, there is little evidence that indoor areas there were contaminated with the toxic dust, he told C&EN. In contrast, photographs document the dust coating the neighborhoods in lower Manhattan where the test-and-clean plan is focused, he said. Meanwhile, the agency cannot test workplaces because it has no legal authority to do so, he said.

The effort to craft the test-and-clean plan, Oppelt says, has drawn lots of energy and resources from EPA staff members. "We've been at this for 21 months," he said, and the agency believes it is time to get on with implementation.

EPA's determination to forge ahead is poor consolation to many New Yorkers.

Many in the audience at the panel's final meeting are bitterly angry-the depth of their ire is profound. They described in heart-wrenching detail the health problems they suffer in the wake of the WTC collapse. Some feel as though they suffered two attacks: one at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists on a sunny September morning in 2001 and the other by their federal government, which they say has left them with unsettling questions about long-term health effects from possible toxic dust in their homes.

Residents and union representatives voiced frustration with the EPA plan, sometimes interrupting the panel's discussions with shouts and boos. Some portrayed the plan as a conspiracy by the Bush Administration to cover up problems with contamination left from the WTC collapse.

Flynn, of 9/11 Environmental Action, traced the genesis of this belief to a 2003 report by the EPA inspector general. The report found that the Bush White House swayed EPA to downplay possible risks from air pollution in the days after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

When EPA announced that the air was safe to breathe after the attack, "it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," that 2003 report said. "Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced ... the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

Thus, New Yorkers are wary of the Bush EPA, Flynn said. "Efforts to produce another false all-clear will not succeed," she added.

Claims that EPA's test-and-clean plan is "an orchestrated cover-up or scam" are "nonsense," Oppelt responded. "I find that personally very offensive," said Oppelt, who is retiring this month after nearly 36 years at the agency.

But Clinton and Nadler are taking seriously concerns of New Yorkers like Flynn. The two lawmakers have asked the Government Accountability Office to determine whether Bush Administration officials interfered with the development of EPA's final cleanup plan or with the operation of the expert panel.

"Did Administration officials inject political considerations ahead of science or the recommendations of the panel in development of the plan?" the two New York Democrats asked in a Dec. 13, 2005, letter to GAO.

Clinton and Nadler also requested that GAO ferret out how the Administration determined that $7 million was the appropriate amount for funding the test-and-clean program.

Nadler and Clinton are also angry at EPA's contention that it cannot test workplaces because that authority lies with the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH).

A spokesman for Nadler, Reid Cherlin, said EPA has two legal authorities allowing it to test and clean up workplaces and other areas contaminated by a terrorist act. One, under the Superfund law, is the National Contingency Plan allowing the agency to conduct emergency removal of hazardous substances. The second, Cherlin said, is Presidential Decision Directive 62, signed in 1998, which instructs FEMA to be the lead agency for "consequence management" with the participation of several other departments, including EPA.

In addition, EPA can ask OSHA and NIOSH to participate in the test-and-clean effort, Cherlin added.

Meanwhile, the fate of the panel of experts seems unclear. The Dec. 13, 2005, meeting was supposed to be its last.

"The panel is finished," Oppelt said at the close of that meeting. The agency likely will convene "a smaller group" selected from the 20-member panel "to see if EPA made the right call" on a WTC signature contaminant, he said.

But Clinton said EPA's disbanding of the panel "is unacceptable." She was instrumental in the panel's formation. She blocked the Senate confirmation of Michael O. Leavitt as EPA administrator in late 2003 until the Bush Administration agreed to form the panel. Leavitt has since become secretary of Health & Human Services.

"The panel has not even begun to meet its mandate to identify unmet public health needs and recommend any steps to further minimize the risk associated with the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks," Clinton said. She pledged to ensure that the expert panel will complete these tasks.

In the meantime, Oppelt said EPA is kicking off its efforts to recruit volunteers for the test-and-clean program this month.

Although the agency may alter the strategy to include tests for a signature WTC contaminant, "we think this is a scientifically defensible plan," Oppelt said. "From an EPA perspective, we've gone as far as we can."

Collection of dust samples and testing will begin in the spring, he added.