WHILE THE NATION was still staring, dazed, at the TV replays of airplanes smashing into glass and concrete, Rudy Giuliani started talking about getting New York up and running again. “I think people tomorrow should try to come back to work,” he said on September 12. “We really want to get the economy of the city as much back to normal as possible.” He’d actually started talking to his inner circle about getting the New York Stock Exchange reopened within hours of its closing on September 11, and proclaimed in a September 12 CNN appearance that it could open the next day.
The desire to return to normalcy, to believe that everything was going to be okay—fast—was nearly universal. While Americans said over and over that September 11 Has Changed Everything, they were simultaneously trying to convince themselves that nothing had changed at all. By September 13, at Giuliani’s urging, all the city cultural centers reopened, and by Monday, September 17, the stock exchange and NASDAQ were back in operation. David Letterman, whose late-night show broadcasts from midtown Manhattan, returned to the air on the same day. “I’ll tell you the reason I am doing a show and the reason I am back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani,” he told the audience. “But in this one small measure, if you’re like me and you’re watching and you’re confused and depressed and irritated and angry and full of grief, and you don’t know how to behave and you’re not sure what to do and you don’t really…because we’ve never been through this before…all you had to do at any moment was watch the Mayor. Watch how this guy behaved. Watch how this guy conducted himself. Listen to what this guy said. Rudolph Giuliani is the personification of courage.”1
The world was indeed watching Rudy Giuliani to see how to behave, and many people would be forever grateful that he had shown them how to be brave. However, the mayor’s repertoire was limited. The workers at Ground Zero who had watched Giuliani striding confidently around without a respirator got the wrong role model. And if the people who worked and lived in Lower Manhattan were expecting the mayor to be their champion, they were going to be disappointed.
THE AREA IMMEDIATELY around the World Trade Center included the Wall Street financial district, Battery Park City, and other high-rise apartment complexes that ran along the Hudson at the tip of the island. Some of the buildings were composed of million-dollar condos owned by financiers or corporations who used the apartments as luxurious crash pads for visiting executives. Others were subsidized mixed-income residences that included a large number of old people. Many housed middle-class professionals and their children. Virtually everyone who could leave after the attack did so quickly. Most of the area was without electricity and telephone service—the two Con Ed substations that routed power to Lower Manhattan had been destroyed by the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. And the air was almost unbreathable, laced with an extremely alkaline dust whose corrosive qualities were likened to ammonia.
George W. Bush was no less determined than Giuliani about getting Wall Street to reopen right away. But technologically, that required several days. The stock exchange had its own power supply, but a Verizon office that handled most of the exchange’s voice and data circuits did not. Harried telephone officials had to rush in portable power generators. As far as the air was concerned, the federal and city governments had one unified message from the beginning: nobody should hesitate to come to work because of the environment. On September 13, the EPA was already announcing that it had analyzed its early air samples and “the general public should be very reassured” by the initial results. “EPA is greatly relieved to have learned that there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City,” said the agency’s head, Christie Whitman. By the 16th, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA said tests showed it was “safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York’s financial district,” and on the 18th, Whitman announced that she was “glad to reassure the people of New York that their air is safe to breathe.”
The Giuliani administration became an EPA echo chamber despite the fact that its own testing had shown hazardous asbestos levels in the air. The city’s test results were concealed from the public, according to the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, which obtained the unreleased numbers from the state and posted them in 2004. No warnings were issued despite the fact that hazardous levels of asbestos were registered up to seven blocks from Ground Zero.2 The city had taken 87 outdoor air tests between September 12 and September 29. Seventeen showed asbestos levels deemed hazardous by both the city and the EPA. Other tests were classified as “overloads”—meaning that there was so much particulate dust in the collection device that no reading could be taken.2 These disturbing test results were shared with the EPA. Nevertheless, both the city and the federal government continued to claim that there was no danger.
SOMETHING ELSE THE public did not know was that the EPA’s announcements were being vetted by the White House and changed to produce the most optimistic possible tone. On September 13, for instance, the EPA press release quoted Administrator Christie Whitman as saying the agency was “greatly relieved to have learned that there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City.” The quote, it turned out, had not been in the original draft. It had been added by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which went through every public statement in the weeks after the attack, inserting a dollop of cheer here and a sunny adjective there. A September 16 EPA draft reported that dust samples “show higher levels of asbestos,” but, after a White House cleansing, “higher” became “variable,” and a concluding clause was added: “but EPA continue [sic] to believe that there is no significant health risk to the general public in the coming days.” As early as September 13, the subhead on a draft announcing “EPA Initiating Emergency Response” went from “Testing Terrorized Sites for Environmental Hazards” to “Reassures Public About Environmental Hazards.”3
It was the nation’s first test of how high concerns for public health would rank in the age of international terror, and the people in charge flunked on several critical counts. The EPA didn’t even have safety standards for some of the dangerous elements, such as dioxin, thrust into the air by the towers’ collapse. Its New York regional office was using 20-year-old methods to measure the asbestos fibers, though other regional offices and private testing firms at Ground Zero used far more modern and sensitive detection equipment.4 The composition of the dust varied greatly from one place to another—even on the same block or inside the same office. But instead of taking that as a warning that what looked safe in one place might not be as harmless elsewhere, the EPA turned things upside down, attributing ominous readings to “spikes” that probably didn’t exist anywhere else. Much later, agency officials would acknowledge that Ms. Whitman’s famous flat-out announcement that the air was “safe” actually applied only to outdoor air far from the pile, not necessarily offices and homes.
And only to asbestos, not other pollutants.
And only to healthy adults, not children or the elderly.
THE MOST PRUDENT course would have been to hold off any reopening of Wall Street until the picture on the air quality was clearer. Indeed, the day Whitman announced everything was safe, over a quarter of the bulk dust samples that had been collected had shown asbestos at levels above the 1 percent benchmark the EPA would use throughout the post-9/11 period. In addition, the first test results on the amount of lead, dioxin, PCBs, and toxic ash in the air were not even available.5 At minimum, the government should have been honest with the people it was summoning back to the financial district. The workers were civilians, and they did not deserve to be spun by the people who were supposed to be their first line of defense against dangers in the air. They deserved to know that the results were at best incomplete, and that the area was very probably not a good place for people with asthma or other preexisting respiratory problems to linger. Pregnant women should certainly have been told that the test results were not available on lead, which can lead to developmental damage in children. (Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News later reported that 17 percent of the samples taken near Ground Zero showed levels of lead above federal safety standards.)6
The amount the experts didn’t know about the air was overwhelming. There were elements in the dust that had never been in the air in substantial quantities before, and for which the EPA had no standards for measuring danger. So the agency focused, in the main, on asbestos, something with which it had great experience—although never in a massive outdoor arena and never when the fibers had been pulverized by such an extraordinary impact. Experts examining the World Trade Center dust later would question whether the crashing towers had broken down the asbestos fibers into minute pieces that were difficult for normal instruments to detect and measure. They also argue about whether such tiny fibers were less dangerous than, more dangerous than, or equally as dangerous as those of normal size.
Asbestos is a deadly mineral. Its fibers can lodge in the lungs, and while the effects tend to be delayed, over the long run they can cause mesothelioma and other potentially fatal respiratory diseases. Critics of the way the city dealt with the asbestos and other air problems after 9/11 often compare the response to two events in the recent past. One was a 1989 explosion of a steam pipe in Gramercy Park, an up-scale neighborhood near midtown Manhattan. The explosion covered the street and nearby buildings with asbestos-laced mud. As a result, the city evacuated 350 people from those buildings and billed Con Ed $90 million for the cleanup and replacement of ruined property.7
The second incident that people pointed to with puzzlement was the discovery that the homes and lawns and gardens of Libby, Montana, had become contaminated with asbestos from vermiculite that was mined in the town. Prompted by a 1999 investigative series by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the government designated Libby a Superfund site for federal cleanup. After 9/11, Joel Kupferman of the New York Law and Justice Project wrote a blistering essay comparing what happened at Libby to the EPA’s performance in New York, arguing that the entire area of Lower Manhattan contained comparable or higher levels of asbestos. One testing from an air vent at a building on Duane Street—a block the EPA said was not even in the contaminated zone—had asbestos levels 50 times higher than the recommended safe levels, Kupfermen found. Though the Law and Justice Project’s findings were seen as an aberration by the EPA, no one disputed that the results here and in another study exceeded anything found in Libby.
The difference between those incidents and 9/11 were, of course, size. Libby was a tiny mining community and the Gramercy Park explosion involved only a few hundred people. Lower Manhattan was the residence of about 34,000 and the center of the nation’s financial network. The government could shut down Libby or relocate a few hundred Manhattanites, but it did not feel it could do the same for the entire area surrounding Wall Street. In fact, the mere mention of Libby and the dreaded word “Superfund” was enough in itself to send officials into denial. Superfund designation was the very thing the city wanted to avoid. While it would have meant far stricter safety standards for the workers at Ground Zero and far greater protection for the residents and workers in Lower Manhattan, it would have delayed that much-desired return to normalcy indefinitely. The White House and the Giuliani administration were terrified that Lower Manhattan would be regarded as a contaminated no-go zone, sending the financial community fleeing to other parts of the country. “We had been pushing to have it regarded as a Superfund site,” said Bruce Lippy, the industrial hygienist, “but people in the political structure said ‘we can’t talk about it as hazardous.’”8
THE WALL STREET workers and Lower Manhattan residents might reasonably have expected their mayor to be their ombudsman, speaking up for them and looking at the federal pronouncements with a skeptical eye. But City Hall did no such thing. Shortly after the attack, Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai Medical Center went distinctly off-message when he warned that exposure to the dust and rubble could produce long-term health problems. Giuliani and his health commissioner, Dr. Neal Cohen, quickly disputed Landrigan’s assessment.
Landrigan was hardly the only credentialed contrarian. A U.S. Geological Survey team, responding to a White House science office request, flew over Lower Manhattan four times between September 16 and 23, using a sensing device designed for exploring Mars and Jupiter. They also collected 35 dust samples from the ground, finding asbestos, heavy metals, and pH levels similar to those of drain cleaners. Dr. Thomas Cahill and a group of scientists convened regularly by the U.S. Department of Energy took measurements a mile north of Ground Zero and found a level of fine particulates higher than that measured at the Kuwaiti oil field fires during the Gulf War.
Kathryn Freed, the City Council representative for the area, was repeatedly rebuffed by Giuliani’s aides when she attempted to get permission to bring an outside testing service to check the air in her district. “Giuliani was in total control and the EPA followed whatever he said,” Freed said later. So on September 18, Freed snuck an independent consulting firm past police barricades to secure samples in two buildings inside the zone, finding elevations up to 100 times EPA standards. Six weeks after the attack, when Juan Gonzalez laid out some of the potential health dangers in a front-page story in the Daily News, a deputy mayor called Gonzalez’s editors to denounce the story and Giuliani went public again with reassurances about how safe it was.
Moderate Republicans from the Northeast tend to be strong on environmental issues. New York governor George Pataki, who had been left looking like a piece of background furniture by Giuliani during the 9/11 recovery, was an activist when it came to fighting pollution and global warming and protecting the upstate wilderness. But environmentalism had never been one of the mayor’s strong suits. His commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection was Joel Miele, who had done a dismal job as buildings commissioner and been rewarded with the top job at DEP. When Miele was hauled before a congressional committee in 2002 to explain his agency’s response to the toxic aftermath of 9/11, he threw up his hands, explaining that his agency was primarily “a water and sewer agency” incapable of handling a large-scale hazardous catastrophe. Previous mayors had appointed commissioners with strong environmental backgrounds to the job and even Giuliani had started out in 1994 with Marilyn Gelber, who had earned the respect of environmentalists with her handling of negotiations to protect upstate watershed lands crucial to the city’s drinking water supply. Gelber’s supporters said she was axed for resisting patronage appointees pushed by the mayor’s office. Whatever the reason, just as the Police Department descended from Bill Bratton to Bernie Kerik, DEP sank to Miele, a Queens Republican who kept a revolver strapped to his ankle.
The other member of the Giuliani team on whom the workers and residents of Lower Manhattan were supposed to rely was Dr. Neal Cohen, the head of the Department of Health. Cohen was a psychiatrist who was married to the cousin of one of Giuliani’s closest associates, Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro. He had had a quiet and undistinguished reign as the city’s top health official, taking center stage only once—in 2000, when Giuliani waged war on the West Nile virus with an intensive spraying campaign. The West Nile virus was a health problem the mayor could relate to, featuring a living enemy embodied in the birds and mosquitoes that were known to carry the disease. With Cohen playing second banana, Giuliani treated the populace to daily reports on the battle. Environmentalists cringed as he ordered spraying in a two-mile radius of each infected bird or virus-bearing mosquito. Spraying crews fanned out over the five boroughs to blanket what the mayor called “hot zones,” while critics argued that the health consequences of the pesticides could be far worse than the dangers of the virus. When a woman walking down West 58th Street in Manhattan was nailed by a city truck that sprayed pesticides directly into her face, leaving her with nausea and blurred vision, the mayor reprimanded her for failing to pay attention to the city spraying schedule. (It turned out that no spraying had been scheduled where the woman was doused, but no apology was forthcoming from City Hall.) Giuliani and Cohen assured New Yorkers that the spraying was not a health hazard, while at the same time instructing them to shut their windows, turn off their air conditioners, and take pets inside on spraying night. “There’s no medicine that you would take that doesn’t carry with it some percentage chance that it could kill you, give you side effects. Those are the kind of choices you are making here,” Giuliani explained, ignoring the fact that he was the one making the choices, while the citizens were taking the risks.
The city’s workers, including those from the Department of Health and DEP, won plaudits for their around-the-clock efforts after the attacks, but it would have taken the men at the top—Miele and Dr. Cohen—to argue for a more forceful response to the EPA’s monitoring of the air quality. Now, as almost always happened in the later days of the Giuliani administration, the men at the top were completely dependent on the mayor for their current stature, and they had neither the standing nor—presumably—the inclination to fight with him.
The mayor deferred to the EPA on the question of air safety because the EPA was saying what Giuliani wanted to hear. But when it came to the question of how the interiors of office buildings and apartments would be cleaned, the city very quickly big-footed federal regulators. The Department of Health took over the job of testing the interiors; Environmental Protection, the exteriors. Having pushed the feds aside, the Department of Health then delayed until November to even start a study of apartment contamination and, though it completed work in December, no results were released until after Giuliani left office. When the study was released nearly a full year after the attack, it revealed that almost 20 percent of the tested apartments “still had interior dust with measurable levels of asbestos.” The federal government seemed happy to step aside in favor of the city, even though it would have had strong legal ground if it wanted to take a more aggressive position. The result was a mess. Everyone behaved more or less as though eliminating tons of dust from office towers that were known to contain tons of asbestos, lead, and other toxic materials was just another janitorial function. The cleaning crews contracted for office and exterior cleanups were made up, in the main, of undocumented immigrants, hired by all sorts of different public and private employers under all sorts of different circumstances, with no coordinated oversight by the city. It was just one sign of what an industrial hygienist said was “the Wild West out there.”9
ABOUT 20,000 RESIDENTS of Lower Manhattan were displaced by the blast. The World Trade Center had been a part of their daily lives. Parents always told their children that if they got lost, they should simply orient themselves by looking for the towers. Their big underground arcades served as the neighborhood shopping mall. “We knew every store in the twin towers,” said Dennis Gault, an art teacher and painter. “We shopped in every store down there. They had a place that made pretzels that were delicious and a toy store for the kids.” Catherine McVay Hughes, who lived on the 14th floor of an apartment building at the south end of Broadway, remembered how her older son had learned to skate there. “I saw a girlfriend do a folk dance there. It was just kind of, I guess, a town square for the community.”
On September 11, Gault and his wife escaped from their 29th-floor apartment, pushing their daughter in a stroller and bearing—improbably—a tutu, which Dennis had numbly thought little Cecilia would need for her first ballet class, scheduled for that evening. Yachiyo Gault, who had worked for the Japanese bank Asahi on the 60th floor of the tower before her baby arrived, was hysterical, convinced dozens of her closest friends were dead. Outside, the esplanade was filled with their anxious, milling neighbors and friends. The Gaults made their way to the ferry to New Jersey and had just scrambled on board when the South Tower collapsed. A giant whitish-gray cloud with pink blotches rushed toward the boat. “I knew the pink stuff was fiberglass insulation,” Gault said.
The nearness of the disaster—and the fact that many of the area’s residents and workers had seen the bodies of trapped workers as they tumbled to the pavement—meant that returning was a potentially traumatic event. But staying away, cut off from neighbors and schools and everything familiar, was worse. The Gaults, who camped out with friends and relatives until Battery Park City allowed its residents to reclaim their apartments, were unnerved when their daughter began to draw pictures of flaming towers and build models of the towers with her blocks, knocking them down and rebuilding them over and over. But when they took Cecilia to her pediatrician, he told them that they were focusing on the wrong problem. “The drawings are natural. What I’m worried about is the smoke coming out of the wreckage. That is highly toxic.”
The plume of smoke did not stop wafting over Lower Manhattan until late December—long after most people had returned to their homes. But even after the smoke disappeared, the dust remained. An estimated 1.2 million tons of it had shot out of the collapsing buildings, and much of it covered not only the floors and furniture of the apartments but also clothing, dishes, toys—the literal fabric of daily lives. Dennis Gault, returning to his apartment after the family’s long sojourn away, walked through and saw nothing but the dust. “I thought, here’s my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and she’s breathing toxins, asbestos. We’re walking on it. It’s in the rugs. I actually panicked.”
He turned to his wife and said, “We’ve got to get her out of here.”
They did just that. Gault sent his wife and daughter to live with his in-laws in Japan and embarked upon the most miserable period of his life. In the dead of winter, he moved back into Battery Park City and started to clean. Week after week, he followed the same routine. He got up, went to work, and then returned to his apartment where he would don a mask and scrub and clean. Frightened that turning on the heater would spew more contaminated air into the apartment, he lived and slept in six sweaters and a hat. He threw away all the family’s earthly possessions—furniture, clothing, dishes, and cookware.
Most people did not have the resources that got the Gaults through their ordeal. Kim Todd, an actress who lived close to the World Trade Center site, found the dust in her apartment was resistant to all attempts at removal—particularly since her back had been injured when she was caught in the tower collapse. “Every week they’d discover something new about the dust or how to get rid of it,” she said. “First it was wet rags, then it was vacuuming, then it was no vacuuming, then it was HEPA filters, but what we discovered was…this didn’t dust off.”
The EPA’s own standards would have called for cleaning by professional services that knew about asbestos removal—and which would have cost $5,000 to $10,000 even for apartments of the modest size most New Yorkers live in. But the White House removed that recommendation from the agency’s press release, even while the EPA hired a certified asbestos abatement contractor to clean its own regional office, which was located just outside the hazard zone. EPA instead wound up referring the public to the New York City Department of Health for advice. The Department’s website recommended that people clean their own homes with wet mops and special high-efficiency particle-arresting (HEPA) vacuum cleaners. (For those who did not happen to have a HEPA vacuum, the Department of Health suggested that “wetting the dust down with water and removing it with rags and mops is recommended.”) A press release told residents it was “unnecessary to wear a mask” while cleaning.10 A city health official told MSNBC Online that those with “underlying respiratory problems” should also follow “simple housekeeping tips like removing shoes, keeping windows closed and changing filters in air conditioners.”11
The landlords in many complexes cleaned the apartments for their tenants, although very few had cleaning crews with anything approaching professional standards. Others got help from volunteers, including a group of Southern Baptists who had come to the city to join in the rescue and found their calling in going around the neighborhood with mops and vacuums. The insurance company sent a crew to clean the apartment belonging to Catherine McVay Hughes and her family, and then began pressuring them to leave the hotel, where the policy was covering their stay, and return home. Hughes bumped into a FEMA worker, who volunteered to come with her to check out the results. He thwacked the arm of her upholstered couch, which sent dust flying. “He said, ‘You have young kids? This is completely not healthy for them. Talk to your pediatrician, and make sure you don’t move back until the fires are out.’” Encouraged, Hughes told the insurance company she was waiting and in the end became one of the last families to return to the apartment building. Meanwhile, she dedicated herself to the cleaning project. Ledges that were wiped clean one day, she found, were dirty again the next. She purchased an air purifier with a filter that was supposed to last six months. “It ended up lasting just two weeks and then they were completely filthy, gray with World Trade Center dust.”
The EPA’s inspector general ultimately concluded that the failure of the government to recommend that residents obtain professional cleaning not only endangered the inhabitants of the apartments but also “may have increased the long-term health risks for those who cleaned WTC dust without using respirators and other professional equipment.” City attorney Kenneth Becker offered a creatively convoluted response to the charge, explaining that it wasn’t really the city that decided that the residents should clean their own homes: “The owners and the residents always had this responsibility. It was never the city’s responsibility to do this and consequently the city could not delegate what it did not have.”12
FEMA helped pay for the city cleanup of building exteriors when owners claimed they could not afford to do the job, but FEMA officials said that they had been told by City Hall that no formal cleanup program was necessary for building interiors.13 And the city did not even offer a certification program that would assure apartment building residents and office workers that the places in which they spent their lives had been properly cleaned. The landlords were responsible for cleaning public areas as well as the heating and ventilation systems, and they were, in theory, supposed to test dust samples in their building before it was reopened. “If more than 1% asbestos was found and testing and cleaning was necessary, it had to be performed by certified personnel,” Joel Miele wrote in a letter to area residents. However, even presuming the landlord was public-spirited enough to comply with a rule that was very clearly not being enforced, the city never established any procedures to compel them to report contamination and their plans to remove it.14
It seems clear that the Lower Manhattan neighborhoods would have done better if the federal government had been in charge of the cleanup, not the city. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled in February 2006 that the Department of Health guidelines “were grossly inadequate,” assailing the EPA decision to defer to the city agency as “conscience-shocking.” Batts said that EPA’s standards were “materially stricter than those the city endorsed” and that the Department of Health guidelines “were meant to apply only to spaces that had been precleaned or tested for asbestos and other toxic substances,” though residents were never told that.
There also seems to be ample evidence that if the city had asked the federal government to oversee the indoor cleanup, the EPA would have taken the job. William Muszynsky, the EPA acting regional administrator at the time, said later, “We offered the city assistance on the indoor testing. At the time, we were operating under FEMA and FEMA takes the position that we work in coordination with city officials. The city’s emergency response people said, ‘We’ll take care of indoor testing.’” Asked if he thought in retrospect that the EPA had made a mistake handing this job off to the city, Muszynsky, who left the regional office in 2004 for another EPA assignment, said, “I think the city should have fulfilled what it said it was going to do.”15 Another top EPA official, Steve Touw, added, “If we had to do it all over again, we should have made sure it got done.” But legally, he added, it was the Giuliani administration’s call.16
City Hall never admitted that it told the EPA it did not need help with the interior cleanup, but the EPA inspector general concluded that is indeed what happened, citing “EPA documentation” of conversations with Giuliani officials on September 30 and October 9. The timing corresponded with a series of remarkable statements by the mayor on October 5 that were noted in Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen’s diary. Giuliani is quoted as saying at a cabinet meeting how “pathetic” it is “that everyone is reverting to the tin cup routine,” adding that “we need to straighten ourselves out…problems will not be resolved by going to Washington…every time you go to Washington for help, another big firm says let’s get out of New York, they don’t know what they’re doing.” Von Essen observed, “RG runs the city the way I ran my house—you don’t take dollars even if someone wants to give it to you unless it is absolutely necessary.”
So the decision to dump the job of the most toxic cleanup in history in the laps of already traumatized building or apartment owners and renters was apparently a matter of ideological preference. If ever an American city had experienced a catastrophe worthy of urgent and massive federal assistance—at least before New Orleans in 2005—this was it. From the perspective of the residents of Lower Manhattan, the mayor had picked a very bad time to decide to reclaim his credentials as a fiscal conservative.
The federal agencies would certainly have either run the indoor program themselves or reimbursed the city for the cost of a thorough, professional decontamination program if Giuliani had lobbied for the money. In fact, that’s precisely what they did when Mayor Bloomberg finally requested that the EPA take the lead on a cleanup in April 2002. The EPA jump-started the idea, according to a top official, because “over time, we saw that New York City was not prepared to handle all the issues related to indoor air.” By the summer of 2003, over 4,000 apartments had been tested and/or cleaned under the program, still far short of what neighborhood leaders demand.
All in all, the efforts in the months immediately following the attack looked like an extraordinarily passive governmental response to a clear and specific health threat. Outside of Ground Zero itself, the main public health responsibility was to give residents enough information to decide when it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan, and then to provide them with competent cleaning and testing services to make their homes free of contaminated dust. Neither the federal government nor the city rose to either challenge.
EPA officials defended their inaction in part by saying that taking responsibility for cleaning dust from all the buildings below Canal Street in Manhattan would have been “a monumental undertaking.” The inspector general acknowledged that it would require “a significant effort,” but noted that President Bush had told Ms. Whitman that she should “spare no expense and to do everything needed to make sure the people of New York were safe as far as the environment was concerned.” In Judge Batts’s subsequent decision finding Whitman personally liable, she said that the facts were sufficient to support claims that Whitman had violated the residents’ right “to be freeaaaaaaaaaaaaa from governmental policies that increase the risk of bodily harm” when she “consistently reassured members of the public that it was safe for them to return to their homes, schools and workplaces just days following the September 11 attacks.”17
Of course, Rudy Giuliani’s statements were indistinguishable from Whitman’s. And almost every failure on the part of the federal government was accompanied by a failure of New York City’s leadership to press the case for stronger action. Senator Hillary Clinton held up the appointment of Whitman’s successor at the EPA for 45 days in 2003 until she got commitments that the agency would move forward on a more wide-ranging Lower Manhattan initiative. In 2001, Giuliani wouldn’t even respond to a health task force formed by the six elected officials who represented the area.
AS 2001 CAME to an end, it seemed as if New York City had, indeed, defied the terrorists and come out of its ordeal stronger than ever. Rudy Giuliani was a national hero. The fires were almost out at Ground Zero, where workmen were clearing the site with remarkable speed and efficiency. Everyone expected that a marvelous new tower and a fitting memorial would replace what was lost, along—perhaps—with a whole new neighborhood of shops and housing and cultural institutions. All the glowing reports made the longtime residents of Lower Manhattan feel even more abandoned. Tom Goodkind, a resident of Battery Park City, a huge complex across the street from the World Trade Center, spent two months camping out in a small studio with his wife and children. He listened to the mayor’s press conferences, waiting to hear some mention of the residents’ plight. “He kept quiet about us and that hurt. We kept wondering why nobody ever mentioned the fact that there were 20,000 people displaced. To this day there’s no answer. We were on our own.” Even more isolated than the displaced residents were those unable to leave their homes. Council-member Kathryn Freed was a resident of Independence Plaza, a large mixed-income complex that was without power and cut off from the rest of the world by the security barriers. She felt she couldn’t accept offers from friends to get out of the area because so many of her neighbors were trapped. “There were too many people in the building who were homebound elderly,” she said. One tenant, a multiple sclerosis victim, could not move on her own, and her home care attendant was unable to get back through the police barricades. Some older residents had to be carried down and taken to shelters. Freed had to struggle to get garbage removal. “I’ll always be angry about what the feds, state and city didn’t do to help us,” she said. “The people responsible for our safety didn’t help. It was like—us or Wall Street.”
The Goodkind family’s apartment was cleaned twice before they returned—once by the landlord and again by the benevolent Southern Baptists. Reassured by the EPA’s statements about the air, they resumed their lives until Goodkind developed heart problems and came down with double pneumonia twice. During the second bout, he said, he was lying half-awake, watching the Republican convention, when Christie Whitman took the stage. “I said to my wife, ‘Is this an illusion?’…I’ve got double pneumonia and they’re cheering her. It was the weirdest feeling.”
City Hall’s relative indifference to the neighborhood’s problems infuriated local elected officials. “The Giuliani administration did nothing but put wrong information on their website and welcomed people to take action that would cause premature death,” stormed Congressman Jerry Nadler. Clinton, Nadler, and Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut, abetted by the Bloomberg reversal of Giuliani’s position on requesting aid, finally got FEMA to fund the $80 million Indoor Residential Assistance Program in 2002. When it was finished in 2003—nearly two years after the attack—the EPA concluded that only 5 percent of the residents still had health hazards, down from the 20 percent of 2002. But the inspector general asked “whether the EPA believes possible asbestos contamination in five percent of the residences is acceptable.” By the time the EPA finished its testing, the inspector general also observed, many residents had long since returned home. “The full extent of public exposure to indoor contaminants resulting from the World Trade Center collapse is unknown,” the IG report concluded.
The federal government planned to resume testing homes and offices, but disagreements stalled that effort in late 2005. Meanwhile, one study showed that women who had breathed the WTC dust and became pregnant had delivered smaller babies, and another reported that asthmatic children who lived within five miles of the site needed more medical treatment after the attack than before.18 A survey of 2,362 residents found that a year after the attack 43.7 percent reported at least one upper respiratory symptom persisting. Comparing residents of Lower Manhattan with those living far to the north in the borough, researchers found that long after the attack, 21 percent of those who lived near Ground Zero reported their “breathing was never quite right” as compared to 9 percent in the control area.19
THE ONE GROUP that completely fell through the cracks during the cleanup was the workers who were hired to clean the offices and, in some cases, large apartment complexes. If residents were given the impression that they could do fine with a damp mop and the right vacuum cleaner, the workers who were hired to work in the dust-covered office buildings were given even less information. The cleaners—often undocumented immigrants—said that they were simply handed mops and told to get to work. “Few of these people we saw were given respirators or taught how to use them,” said Dr. Steven Markowitz, who conducted free respiratory screenings from January to March in 2002.20 And few of them had health coverage.
Dennis Gault, who totally distrusted the competency of the group his building’s management sent to clean his apartment, felt sorry for the workers rather than angry. “They mostly looked like illegal aliens,” he said. “The sad thing was, I was throwing out all my daughter’s toys, and these people were taking them. These were poor people.”
In 2005, Village Voice reporter Kristen Lombardi interviewed one of the cleanup workers, Alex Sanchez. Sanchez said he spent seven months working in the dust-covered offices in the skyscrapers near the World Trade Center. At 38, he was unable to walk without a cane and was bent over with pain, his breathing compromised by asthma. “The EPA said the air was safe and when you read that coming from a government official you don’t second-guess it,” he said.21