N.Y. Air’s Purity a Matter of Dispute

As New Yorkers choked and gagged under a cloud of smoky dust after the World Trade Center attacks, the Environmental Protection Agency constantly assured them that the air did not pose a major health risk.

“EPA is greatly relieved to learn that there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos in the air in New York City,” said Administrator Christie Whitman in a Sept. 13 message repeated many times.

But now, amid growing scientific evidence of high asbestos levels in homes and other potentially serious air quality problems related to the attacks, many New Yorkers believe the EPA misled them and was perhaps too eager to promote the return to business as usual in lower Manhattan.

“The assurances we got from the EPA came from ignorance, and we do not want to pay a terrible price in death and sickness down the road,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) said Thursday, joining federal, state and local officials in a call for the EPA to clean up contaminants inside New York homes and businesses.

“Federal officials have only tested the air outside,” he added. “They couldn’t possibly know if the city is really safe now.”

It was the latest outburst in an escalating debate over New York’s environmental health after Sept. 11. EPA officials deny they have overlooked health needs, and in a statement Thursday the agency said it has used “sound science” to chart the problem and “has undertaken an unprecedented response to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.”

Yet the criticism mounts.

Ever since the fires and smoke at the trade center site disappeared, there has been less concern over outdoor air quality and an increasing focus on indoor contaminants. The agency’s independent ombudsman has called for a probe of Whitman’s reassuring statements about air quality. And a senior EPA chemist has charged that asbestos levels in New York homes pose a health risk equal to that of Libby, Mont., a mining town so contaminated it has been declared a U.S. Superfund site.

Meanwhile, parents are rebelling against Board of Education orders to return their children in three weeks to public elementary schools near ground zero, saying they won’t go back until they are convinced the air is safe.

An unprecedented study has been launched to test pregnant women who were exposed to the clouds of gas and smoke at the World Trade Center, and health testing has also begun for hundreds of day laborers who have been working at the site without adequate respiratory protection.

While there is no hard scientific evidence that New Yorkers are in danger from contamination, many observers say federal officials failed to properly communicate the level of medical risk to the city.

“All along, the EPA and other departments have been assuring people in New York City that things were fine, but things were not fine,” said Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of Mount Sinai Hospital’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. “There was a great desire to resume business as usual here, and I do mean business, because there’s a great push to commercially redevelop the [World Trade Center] site.”

Much of the controversy has focused on asbestos testing. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, a large but still undetermined amount of asbestos used in the original building construction rained down on Manhattan. The site was only partially lined with the cancer-causing fireproofing material, because New York outlawed its use in 1971 while the buildings were under construction.

Many experts believe that the force of the airplane blast pulverized the asbestos into particles smaller than those normally identified by detection equipment. And while rigorous EPA tests suggest the outside air at the site is free of dangerous contamination, several private studies using more sophisticated technology have shown higher levels of asbestos and other contaminants in the smaller dust particles that blew into homes and offices near the World Trade Center.

The tests, by HP Environmental Inc. of Herndon, Va., and Chatfield Technical Consulting, a Canadian firm, could not determine whether those exposed to the minute particles would develop any potentially fatal diseases. Typically, individuals must be exposed to asbestos for long periods of time, and the disease may not appear for 20 years or more.

“We found conditions that EPA inspectors may not have suspected,” said Hugh Granger, who directed the HP Environmental study. “And we don’t want to alarm people, but this kind of information should be widely known.”

Under EPA guidelines, 70 fibers of asbestos per square millimeter calls for decontamination procedures in schools. In the HP study, several indoor samples showed more than 300 fibers per square millimeter.

EPA officials have said they do not regulate the interior of people’s homes, and that the responsibility for enforcing such cleanup rests mainly with the city’s health department. But the health department has come under heavy fire for advising people to clean up potentially dangerous particles of airborne asbestos with wet rags, mops and other crude home equipment, instead of the costly and more effective vacuums used at other sites.

Amid the debate, Levin and other experts urge calm. While he said there had been an “unexpectedly high” number of respiratory complaints from New Yorkers, especially among office workers and people who lived near the site, he believes health dangers are greatly abating.

“The fires at the site are out and the risks are diminishing,” he told parents from Public School 150 at a meeting this week to decide whether they should return to the school, six blocks from the World Trade Center site. The school and several others were evacuated after the attacks.

Levin pointed to recent air quality tests at the school, indicating that levels of asbestos, lead and other contaminants did not pose a danger to students. Given all the information that is now available, he said he would not have a problem sending his children back to school near the disaster site.

Yet some parents were not convinced and asked pointed questions: Is there an air quality problem caused by trucks filled with trade center debris that rumble past the school? Is it safe for youngsters to play outside for 45 minutes at recess so close to the site? And what about the contaminated dust particles that may be tracked into the school by children playing outside?

By the end of the meeting, parents were still wrestling with the question, but they clearly resented the Board of Education’s edict that their children and students of other schools had to return to their original campuses by Feb. 4. Earlier, parents at nearby Public School 89, citing health concerns, voted against returning.

“You just don’t know who to believe in the government anymore,” said one angry mother, preparing to leave the meeting in the cafeteria of the Greenwich Village school where Public School 150 students have been temporarily housed since the attacks. “I don’t think federal people told us the truth.”

Those concerns prompted Robert J. Martin, the EPA’s national ombudsman, to call for an inquiry into Whitman’s assurances about air quality. Martin, who has called for 35 investigations into EPA actions over the years, is waging a court battle against Whitman’s effort to dissolve his job at the agency.

“We felt there was something rotten in Denmark,” said Hugh Kauffman, Martin’s chief investigator. “I don’t want anyone to be scared [about asbestos levels], but we need to find out what exactly she [Whitman] knew when she made these comments, and how forthcoming the agency was.”

Yet another charge has been lodged by Cate Jenkins, an EPA chemist, who has performed a risk assessment study of reported asbestos levels in New York homes, and found the city has a level comparable to that of Libby, Mont., where hundreds of people died of asbestos poisoning from nearby mines.

She cautioned, however, that her analogy to Libby is a projection. It is not based on epidemiological studies, which rely on medical histories to chart the onset of diseases and the conditions that caused them.

“If EPA doesn’t call for uniform, proper cleanups in these Manhattan homes, the risks will be very high down the line for people,” she said.

Elsewhere, researchers at Columbia University’s School of Public Health and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine are launching a study that will track the effect of the terrorist attacks on 300 pregnant women. They want to know what chemicals and metals these individuals were exposed to, and whether they contribute to any health problems in the mothers or their children.

David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Coalition on Occupational Safety and Health, said, “We need to make it clear that not everybody will get ill in New York or has been exposed to something bad.

“But people get concerned, sometimes to the point of hysteria, if we don’t have a coordinated governmental response to the problem and what people should do. In New York, that’s been sorely missing.”