Whitman: EPA Knew 9/11 Contamination Put Workers, Residents at Risk

by Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium: Tue., Jun 26, 2007
Filed under: House Judiciary Committee Reports

The “rules of the House of Representatives” prohibit audience members from hoisting signs and from disrupting proceedings with applause, anger, or any other kind of outburst. To judge from his admonition to the crowd at the end of his opening statement, it seems clear that Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chair of the judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, suspected that Monday’s proceedings might inflame emotions.He was correct.

The hall was filled to capacity, largely with those people—firefighters, police officers, and others—whose efforts atop the rubble of the World Trade Center ultimately devastated their health. Four attendees sitting near the back of the room tried to hold up pictures of relatives who had succumbed to their illnesses, but the rules prohibited even that small gesture.

They had come to hear Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explain to the House why city employees and volunteers were allowed to work amid the devastation caused by 9/11 without respirators, and why area residents were welcomed back into Lower Manhattan when evidence strongly indicated that harmful toxins still lingered in both the air and in the piles of dust and debris that had blown into apartments and businesses away from ground zero.

For nearly an hour, not a single Republican Congressman was present at the hearing, which was finally joined by ranking member Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and, later, by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). Franks blamed the low turnout on the hearing’s odd timing—a Monday afternoon—and said of himself, “no one tried harder to get here sooner.”

In their absence, the inquiries focused on two main issues. The first examined the EPA’s efforts to inform volunteers and the greater public about the environmental hazard in the vicinity of the disaster site. Scientists had determined—and had informed EPA officials—that the air quality on the debris pile was extraordinarily harmful, and that landed dust contained dangerous levels of asbestos and other carcinogens. But those findings were not reflected in the statements Whitman and others made at the time, which reassured residents that the air in the neighborhood was safe, and that dust could be cleaned with wet wipes and HEPA-filtered vacuums.

Those statements were vetted by the White House (through the National Security Council), whose explicit interest was in allowing commerce and investment to continue in and around Wall Street. Whitman deflected the significance of a call she had received from a Bush economic adviser who was seeking to reopen the stock market in short order. “We weren’t going to let the terrorists win,” she noted, prompting the second of several illicit uproars from the audience, despite Nadler’s order. She reiterated her contention that the area outside the rubble pile—enclosed by a so-called “green line”—was safe for inhabitants.

In response, Nadler observed that since the law requires asbestos to be disposed of professionally, and that since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had concluded that dust in the area contained asbestos, inciting the public to dispose of that dust might itself have been a crime. Whitman ultimately did recommend that the public retain professional cleaners in late October, a month and a half after the attacks.

The other point of contention concerned the workers themselves. Few of them were provided with the shoulder-borne respirators that would have protected their respiratory systems from the asbestos, pulverized concrete and other alkaline inhalants that contaminated the disaster site throughout the dismantling process.

John Henshaw, who headed OSHA at the time, testified that his office could not compel rescue workers in Manhattan to wear respirators because, unlike rescue workers at the Pentagon, they were city employees—policemen and firefighters whose safety falls under the purview of the Mayor’s office. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did not mandate them. According to experts Mt. Sinai Medical Center, today nearly three-quarters of 9/11 first responders have contracted some kind of illness, usually respiratory and often chronic.

At one point, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) suggested that Whitman, who claims she knew how deadly the inhalants were, could have wrested control of the clean-up effort from the city and then insisted that all workers use respirators as was the standard at the Pentagon. Whitman had a hard time addressing the point, except to suggest that she wasn’t then certain that she had a legal basis for taking such a drastic step. She added that she didn’t believe the public would have accepted such an incursion from the federal government anyhow.

Outside of the hearing room, I spoke with several men from the World Trade Center Rescuers Foundation; officers, firefighters, and EMTs who have had to retire because of the debilitating illnesses that, they contend, are the results from the months they spent on the pile.

None were impressed with Whitman’s performance before the subcommittee. Retired Lieutenant Bill Gleason of the New York Fire Department is now thin and pale and suffers from Hyper-reactive Airway Disorder. He takes $7,000 worth of medication every month and has had seven surgeries—including on his sinuses, lungs, and appendix—since 2002. Detective Michael Valentine, who left the pile in early 2002, but was stationed in neighborhood precincts for three years thereafter, suffers from lymphatic tumors. Both men are under 50.

They claim they would still be on their respective beats had they remained in robust health. They also claim that, contrary to the testimony they’d just listened to, working with a full respirator would have been a cinch if only they’d known just what was in the air. Valentine says he “hadn’t seen one person from the EPA” from September through to January, nor been asked to take preventive measures.

“She blamed the victim,” said Gleason. “If she had stood on the pile and told us how bad it was she could have saved tens of thousands” from illness or worse. Instead, Whitman worked willfully with the administration because, she said, in a war-like situation it was important for the administration “to speak with one voice.” That may have been convenient for federal officials. But the feeling in the committee room—of those conducting the inquiry and of the agitated victims in the audience—was expressed eloquently by second-round panelist Suzanne Mattei, a former New York City Sierra Club executive. The EPA, she said, “encouraged people to ignore their own common sense.

The air looked bad and smelled bad. Using common sense, many people would have guessed that the air was unsafe for themselves and their children. The sad irony is that if the EPA had said nothing at all, the public would probably have been better off.”