A Community Asserts Its Right to Know

"We were in our apartment when the towers went down," says Foster Maer, a lawyer who lives about four blocks north of the World Trade Center site with his wife and two children. Along with thousands of downtown residents, they evacuated. When they returned they found that everything inside their apartment was covered with a fine layer of dust from the WTC's collapse. Outside, the dust coated pavements, steps, rooftops and trees, and blew around in the wind, along with chemical-smelling smoke from the smoldering rubble.

Residents asked whether the air was safe to breathe but felt they were not getting helpful answers. They held the first of a series of community meetings to demand information and action from officials. A week after September 11, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the air was safe and people could move back. But many citizens, including Maer, had their doubts. For one thing, anybody on the street could tell something was unhealthy about the air: The smoke lingered for weeks, and face masks were worn as far north as the Bronx. Symptoms of residents near ground zero ranged from eye, nose and throat irritation to asthma, sleeplessness and depression. Dozens of cases of WTC-related respiratory problems, including reactive airway disease, were reported among ground zero workers. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, at least 10,000 New Yorkers experienced short-term health problems. Some air samples showed high levels of toxic chemicals such as benzene, lead, chromium, dioxin and PCBs.

"EPA should have been very clear about what it knew and didn't know, and explained that to families to give them the tools to make the right decisions," says Andy Darrell, regional director of Environmental Defense, who also lives in the WTC neighborhood. "My daughter was 18 months old, and I knew that most of the health standards were based on adults' occupational exposures." Some unknowns: the EPA did not test the air for ultrafine particles of soot, measuring less than 2.5 microns, which have been linked to lung cancer in a study of 500,000 adults in 116 U.S. cities. The EPA also limited its asbestos tests to larger fibers, while some samples of smaller fibers, in private tests, exceeded safety thresholds fourfold.

While most test results released by the EPA showed amounts of pollutants below health thresholds, "the charts don't tell the complete story," says Leon Tulton, a research assistant working on a downtown asthma study. "They only take an average of a 24-hour period, whereas on some days there may be one to two hours where levels go above the threshold." This averaging, Tulton says, overlooks the possible effects of pollution spikes on vulnerable populations: asthmatics, the very young and the elderly.

The EPA could also have admitted that there is little evidence regarding the health effects of such multiple chemical exposures as befell New Yorkers last fall. "We've never had any experience where that incredible mix of chemicals, lead and heavy metals were all crushed under that weight. The reassurances may be true...but there are just too many unknowns," David Rosner, a professor of public health at Columbia University, told the New York Times on November 4.

Many citizens found themselves coping with the unknown. This included the safety of indoor air, which the EPA had not tested at all--an oversight for which the agency has been criticized by its own chief investigator. The agency's excuse was the lack of standards for indoor air quality under the federal Clean Air Act. But in the asbestos-contaminated factory town of Libby, Montana, Darrell notes, "the EPA required indoor testing and cleanup, and wearable monitors by residents."

Rather than rely on the reassuring findings of the New York City Board of Education, parent associations at area schools hired environmental consultants. "We wanted to improve the ventilation system and add high-efficiency filters to trap ultrafine particles, but the Board of Education only upgraded us to filters with less than half the efficiency. And they never cleaned the air ducts," says Rochelle Kalish, a teacher and Stuyvesant High School parent. Stuyvesant has borne the added burden of being adjacent to a dust- and fume-releasing loading dock for WTC debris. Shortly after the school reopened on October 9, dozens of children complained of headaches, itchy eyes, rashes, congestion and bloody noses. As late as December, outdoor air near the school and dock showed elevated levels of toxic chemicals; on one day in January, 74 out of 125 indoor air tests for particulates exceeded child-safety limits. Indoor air at Stuyvesant registered levels of lead above federal standards in January and February. "I'm worried about the long-term effects," Kalish says. Parents and teachers at many area schools questioned whether students should return at all. "We're only a half-block away from the WTC. There are signs saying anyone leaving the site should go to the decontamination center. What about our kids, who'll be breathing the air and picking up the dust on their clothes and shoes?" asked Heather Dubin, a teacher at the High School of Economics and Finance.

At home, parents went on coping. Donna Bulseco, a writer whose apartment, 10 blocks north, faced away from the WTC dust cloud, chose not to evacuate but kept windows closed and air conditioners off to keep pollution out. The Maers had their indoor air tested. "It showed some asbestos, though not above danger thresholds, and also some lead," Foster says. The Maers stayed at a hotel while their apartment was cleaned by asbestos-trained professionals, and threw out anything that had absorbed dust, including beds, bedding and their couch. They washed all their clothes and rugs, had books individually cleaned and installed high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) purifiers.

Although many, like the Maers, ultimately received insurance, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or Red Cross payments, others faced uncooperative landlords, reluctant to pay for testing and cleanup. Now Congressman Jerrold Nadler is pushing for federal money to professionally clean the thousands of downtown apartments that may still be contaminated. And people are looking ahead to the rebuilding phase, when "the community will be full of diesel fumes from non-road construction vehicles, the worst polluters of any class of vehicle nationwide," Andy Darrell says. Residents are seeking requirements that these vehicles use ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel, and that engines be retrofitted with particulate traps. These could serve as a model for communities nationwide.

In March, after all those community meetings and public hearings, New York City established a task force and public hotline to answer questions about WTC environmental and health issues. "We had to organize and put a lot of pressure on the government. And they've disclosed substantially more than they originally did," Foster Maer says. Thanks to the concern and assertiveness this community has shown, their ordeal may spur the development--and enforcement--of new indoor and outdoor standards for cleaner, healthier air for us all.