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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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July 15, 2005 The 9/11 Environmental Disaster The Unfairness of the FAIR Act to the Ground Zero Community by Jenna Orkin The beleaguered Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act (S 852) which would set up a fund to compensate only a fraction of the victims of asbestos-related disease and those, inadequately, and which manages to offend insurance companies as well, would exclude thousands of victims of the environmental disaster of 9/11. According to Joel Shufro of the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, http://www.nycosh.org/ Ground Zero workers wouldn't qualify (1) much less residents, students or anyone with a questionable smoking history. Perhaps the thinking with respect to the last group is, let them sue the tobacco companies. From the beginning, asbestos has been treated as the Darth Vader of the environmental disaster of 9/11. Even the EPA which was harshly critiqued by its own Inspector General in 2003 and is being sued by Ground Zero workers, students, office workers and residents (of whom this writer is one, as a named plaintiff in a potential class action suit) have acknowledged it might be a problem. Their press releases in the days immediately following the disaster focussed exclusively on asbestos at the expense of the hundreds of other contaminants that were released in the collapse of the buildings as well as in the fires that were to burn for over three months. It was about asbestos that the White House Council on Environmental Quality edited at least one of those press releases, turning cautionary statements into reassurances. And when Christy Todd Whitman declared, "The air is safe to breathe," it was about asbestos that she was most specifically lying. http://www.mesothel.com/pages/nypost_Jul16_pag.htm Estimates of how much asbestos was in the World Trade Towers range from several hundred tons (Fallout, by Juan Gonzalez) to five thousand tonnes (Sigrun Davidsdottir in The Guardian). A good portion of the material came from Libby, Montana, which some scientists contend is a particularly noxious subspecies. What is not in dispute is that many workers from the Libby mine have become ill, as have members of their families from their non-occupational exposure, for instance to the miners' clothes. In testimony submitted to a Field Hearing held by Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman in February, 2002, Dr. Cate Jenkins of EPA wrote:
(The former Deutsche Bank building was later found to have 150,000 times the normal level of asbestos, as well as astronomical levels of dioxin and other contaminants.) Crushed by the twin towers, the asbestos at the WTC was pulverized to particles of unusually small size which some scientists believe make it especially dangerous to human health. They argue that it is not so much the length of the fiber that matters as its "aspect ratio," the ratio of length to width which for optimum disease potential should be at least 3:1. The dispute has real-world consequences: Since EPA is of the "short fibers are not dangerous" school of thought, they didn't measure them. "I don't even know whether EPA knows the very small fibers are there, but to say that small fibers are not dangerous defies logic," said Dr. Hugh Granger in an article by Andrew Schneider in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "In most of the autopsies on asbestos victims, the predominance of fibers we see are small, under five microns." http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/54382_asbestos14.shtml Confronted with angry and at times litigious Ground Zero workers and community members, some of whom already have respiratory illnesses from the other contaminants they inhaled (asbestos-related disease does not usually manifest itself for several decades after exposure) in the years since 9/11 EPA has backpedalled from its early sanguine statements about asbestos. Ignoring the memo of 2004 which showed they were actively lying, they have protested that while their 'good news' was perhaps premature, it was based on the best science at the time. What was that best science? According to Dr. Jenkins in the article by Andrew Schneider quoted above, EPA used twenty-year-old testing methods. For every fiber of asbestos they found, independent contractors found nine. With chronic exposure to apartments whose furnishings might still contain asbestos, the risk of cancer from that contaminant alone could be as high as one person in ten. Jenkins went on to compile a nearly 500 page document detailing EPA's actions after 9/11 in which she explained that instead of using electron microscopes to test for asbestos, EPA Region 2 of New York used simple light microscopes, roughly equivalent to what might be found in a high school chemistry lab. EPA Region 8 in Libby "had a contract with a mobile laboratory that could have been on the WTC scene in 45 minutes" with electron microscopes. Region 2's William Muszynski told Region 8, "We don't want you fucking cowboys here. The best thing they could do is reassign you to Alaska." (Dr. Cate Jenkins Memo, July 4, 2003. Sections K-L.) Fortunately a taskforce was formed to investigate what went wrong with Region 2's choice of test methods for WTC fallout. Unfortunately the Task Force was chaired by Muszynski. In addition to these problems, EPA used a standard to determine the danger posed by asbestos according to which anything less than 1% of the dust constituted a clean bill of health. It's doubtful that that standard should have been applied at all. According to the Federal Register, "[A]vailable evidence supports the conclusion that there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos." [Federal Register CFR Part 763: p.15728] And according to Schneider, "EPA's own experts as well as physicians at the CDC and private research centers have shown that a single, heavy dose of asbestos can be enough to cause the lethal [asbestos-related lung] disease. Last month, the EPA issued a report documenting that casual exposure to asbestos has caused disease.... ''They keep calling it a trace. This implies to the public that there is no hazard from it,' said Dr. Jerrold Abraham, director of environmental and occupational pathology at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. 'If you're talking about pure chrysotile asbestos, there are 10 billion or more fibers per gram, or about a fifth of a teaspoon. 'Their whole measuring and reporting system needs to be made more honest.'" (Schneider) But even if the 1% standard were to be used, it is intended to measure intact materials from which a small piece might break off to become pulverized and inhaled. In the environmental disaster of 9/11, intact materials were pulverized; 100% of them could be inhaled. When confronted with these issues, EPA officials have protested that it's not their place to discuss health implications; they're not a public health agency. Surely, then, it has also not been their place to reassure the public that the air has been safe to breathe. Based on EPA's false assurances, the New York City Department of Health recommended that residents clean their apartments themselves using a wet mop or rag and that they 'avoid inhaling the dust' while cleaning up. But state and federal asbestos-removal regulations demand that the cleanup be done by personnel wearing special respirators, full head-to-toe protective suits and gloves and that the waste be disposed of only at authorized sites. Schneider asked EPA Spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow about EPA's discrepant advice. She responded: "'[W]e removed it from our Web site last month,' she said. 'Obviously, our asbestos program was overwhelmed by a catastrophe of this magnitude. We are usually only concerned with asbestos from renovations and building demolition.' But a check of EPA's Web site yesterday found the same links were being used." (Schneider) Bellow's excuse once again raises the question, If your asbestos program was overwhelmed by a catastrophe of this magnitude, why did you keep telling everyone there was no problem? In the years since September 11, the community of Ground Zero has learned more than we ever wanted to know about asbestos. For instance, we have learned that if a six foot man holds out his arm and releases a handful of particles of the substance, they will take eight hours to reach the ground. Thus no one, particularly small children should be around for at least eight hours after asbestos has been stirred up. In their cleanup of 2002, however, EPA was known to rip up carpets in asbestos-contaminated buildings without notice. Some of us have also read that while asbestos can be lethal to inhale, it seems to be ok to drink; hence its use in waterpipes although why a fire retardant would be used in waterpipes was for a while unclear to us. (Asbestos has a variety of uses. And the odd news about drinking it falls into the don't-try-this-yourself category.) But what remains beyond doubt is that the dichotomy between those who are exposed to asbestos through their occupation and those who are exposed at home or at school or through volunteering is a false one. It is based on the outdated assumption that exposure to asbestos outside a factory, say, is negligible. As EPA's own statements confirm, Lower Manhattan following 9/11 was no ordinary neighborhood. And because of EPA's continued intransigence with respect to representative testing, it remains an open question as to how safe some buildings downtown and in the surrounding area are even today. The disaster of 9/11 casts into stark relief the unfairness of the FAIR Act. For further reading: http://www.911ea.org/ -- http://www.sierraclub.org/groundzero/
Jenna Orkin has written articles for Counterpunch and other websites on the environmental disaster of 9/11 as well as other subjects. She is an activist, currently as Spokesperson for the World Trade Center Environmental Organization.
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