Not we, say the City of New York, the Port Authority and their contractors:
Fifty-seven Ground Zero workers have died and thousands of others have been sickened by exposure to a noxious mix of chemicals released when the World Trade Center was reduced to smoldering rubble, their lawyer said yesterday.
But in a courtroom blocks from the site, the city denied responsibility, saying its contractors were acting in the nation’s defense as they worked to restore Ground Zero in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
So if it wasn’t the City of New York’s fault, nor the Port Authority’s, who is responsible for the deaths and illnesses caused by these toxic chemicals? Maybe it’s the one culprit who isn’t a party to the lawsuit: The Bush administration through the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency:
EPA’s early public statements following the collapse of the WTC towers reassured the public regarding the safety of the air outside the Ground Zero area. However, when EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was “safe” to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement. At that time, air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Furthermore, The White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, 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. […]
Information and the analyses of available data did not fully support the statement made in the September 18, 2001, release, which quoted the EPA Administrator as saying the air was “safe” to breathe. Four factors in particular posed limitations on the conclusions that could be made at that time about air quality:
• A lack of data results for many pollutants,
• An absence of health benchmarks for asbestos and other pollutants,
• Imprecise optical asbestos sampling methodologies, and
• Over 25 percent of the bulk dust samples collected before September 18 showed the presence of asbestos above the 1 percent benchmark.EPA did not have monitoring data to support reassurances made in press releases up to September 18 because it lacked monitoring data for several contaminants, particularly PCBs, particulate matter, dioxin, and PAHs.
Just remember that the next time you hear Republicans going on about how only the President’s strong leadership has kept our Nation safe. This is the same President who had no qualms about lying to the citizens of New York and the thousands of police, workers and volunteers who came to assist with the cleanup effort at the Ground Zero site about the safety of the air they would be breathing. Now 57 people have died from exposure to toxic chemicals which contaminated the Ground Zero site, and thousands more have fallen ill.
You might wonder why there had to be such a hurry to clean up the site, and why they had to lie about the hazardous conditions of the World Trade Center site. And you might wonder why the White House was stepping on the EPA to downplay the dangers to the health of thousands of people. Well here’s the official explanation that was given, for what it’s worth:
President Bush’s senior environmental adviser yesterday [Note: article was dated August 23, 2003] defended the White House involvement, saying it was justified by national security. […]
The day after the attacks, former EPA Deputy Administrator Linda Fisher’s chief of staff e-mailed senior EPA officials to say that “all statements to the media should be cleared” first by the National Security Council, which is Bush’s main forum for discussing national security and foreign policy matters with his senior aides and Cabinet, the inspector general’s report says.
National Security. The last refuge of scoundrels, rogues and murderers.
This may just be the tip of the iceberg.
Thousands of people who lived around the area in Lower Manhattan had their homes and personal possessions covered in layers of ash and dust, a by-product of the fires and the collapse of the WTC buildings.
Sierra Club issued a detailed report on the immediate dangers posed by these contaminants and the inadequacy of the Federal government to protect people in the aftermath.
Here’s the link http://www.sierraclub.org/groundzero/ to the 2004 report and the updated 2005 report.
I know a woman who went down to help the victims at Ground Zero after it happened. She’s now so sick she has to be on oxygen a good part of the day. She can’t be on her feet for more than a few hours. Really sad. And that’s a great report. I referenced that too, below.
And what’s really sad is, no health agency will take her claim. Red Cross told her go see this agency, etc. She was sent in a big loop which sent her right back to where she started. Horrific.
The problem had to go away – and fast – because of the close proximity of Wall Street. The financial hazards of not appearing to return the nation’s financial system to business as usual as soon as possible trumped any chemical and health hazards. In typical BushCo fashion, those “little people” were expendable for the national – read financial – security.
Christie Whitman could have stood up to BushCo and said “NO,” and risked being fired – or quit – over the matter. But she didn’t. Just like Colin Powell in the run-up to the war. I don’t think either of them are horrifically evil people, especially compared to Cheney or Rumsfeld; they were weak at the moment of truth, and others died – and continue to die – as a result. Dante had a special circle of hell for such folks.
Anyone with the slightest training in the environmental or health and safety field, any fireman or paramedic, knew that some percentage of those workers were going to die, as surely as the troops invading Normandy. Many of them knew it themselves, to varying degrees. Had we connected the dots, we’d have known at that moment that our troops would be sent into battle without proper bulletproof vests and armored vehicles.
The bastards capable of the one crime are fully capable of the other.
I’m reminded of a line I used in a diary or comment quite a while back: “All the crimes are one crime.” Indeed.
personally, I would have been willing to risk illness or death to try to rescue any survivors. But, they quickly cordoned off the area.
There was no need to lie about the conditions there, as there would have been no shortage of volunteers willing to take the risks.
I spent three weeks in Europe last summer on a speaking tour, talking about the horrrible environmental and personal health damage at Ground Zero, and how the White House Council on Environmental quality overrode the EPA. Here are some excerpts from my talk – you can read the whole thing, sans the PowerPoint slides, at the Real History Blog.
The facts do not support the EPA’s belated excuse, as shown in bold below. But blame too goes directly to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The best summary I’ve found online, with documentation of citations, is the Sierra Club’s important Ground Zero report.
At any rate – here’s the relevant part from the speech I gave:
people is the equivalent of not fully addressing what has happened to some soldiers and their family situations….the children who will and are being affected by having a parent whig out and be absent in their lives due to PTSD. It’s strange because compensation was made available to those who lost a loved one on September 11th……I suppose it helped to gather the necessary steam for the run up to the war, since then though compensation for other losses is absent or given grudgingly, except for those life insurance policies on the soldiers – they aren’t dragging their feet on those anymore and they come right across with the money! They couldn’t afford to have that come out in the press!
Bush and the GOP warmongers remind me of that famous apocryphal quote about George “Blood and Guts” Patton.
One soldier to another: “Our blood, his guts.”
My recollection is that it was Cheney who ordered the “all clear” directive.