Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Health, North America

HEALTH-U.S.: The Ghosts of Ground Zero

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Feb 1 2005 (IPS) - When President George W. Bush gives his State of the Union address Wednesday night, he will undoubtedly mention the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

What he won’t talk about, critics say, is the ongoing failure of federal watchdogs like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make downtown Manhattan safe for workers and residents, thousands of whom are still sick from exposure to toxins like asbestos, dioxin and PCBs.

“The EPA is mandated to clean up buildings contaminated in terrorist attacks, and the EPA has refused to obey the law,” says New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler.

Nadler sent a letter to the president on Oct. 29, 2004 repeating concerns that “starting two days after the attack, the EPA initiated a strategy of misleading the public and providing false assurances about air quality.”

A report by the EPA inspector general in August 2003 confirmed that agency officials had downplayed the dangers posed by poisonous dust and debris from the collapsed towers – and that they had done so at the direction of the White House.

But more than a year after that report, the agency has yet to take substantive action, Nadler says, and the president has not responded to his letter.

In its defence, the EPA says it performed monitoring and sampling of air, dust, and river and drinking water. It also provided thousands of respirators to response workers, carried out studies of indoor cleaning methods, and cleaned and tested thousands of homes in lower Manhattan.

But Nadler and others believe that the EPA has largely shirked its mandate as the lead agency responsible for decontaminating the area, particularly the Deutsche Bank building next to the World Trade Centre, where testing has found asbestos levels 150,000 times higher than normal.

So the legislator is taking his complaints to Bush in person, along with representatives of health, environmental, community and labour groups, who plan to be a visible presence during the president’s address before Congress.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday in New York’s Pennsylvania Station before boarding the train to Washington, Nadler said he and Rep. Carolyn Maloney would reintroduce legislation today to extend medical monitoring programmes and secure federal money to pay for treatment for victims that lack insurance.

They also want to make the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund available to people whose illness or injury is just emerging, or growing worse over time.

Many of the exposed workers sought help at the Mount Sinai Centre for Occupational and Environmental Medicine in Manhattan, which was given funding to screen workers involved in the clean-up and recovery efforts.

Of the 12,000 people seen so far, doctors have analysed the data from about 10 percent, and are disturbed by the findings.

“What is really striking is the high rates of respiratory problems seen in many of those workers two to three years later,” said Dr. Steven Levin, co-director of the World Trade Centre screening programme, who joined Nadler at the press conference. “Many also have psychological problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Funding has been renewed for our programme for another five years, but these people will have to be followed for much longer if we’re to detect the cancers that could appear in 20 years,” he explained.

Levin also emphasised that many patients have no insurance to pay for treatment, and the workers compensation system, a state-run programme to provide medical treatment and cash benefits for workers injured on the job, “has not been responsive”.

Kevin Mount, a sanitation engineer who worked to clear the rubble, told reporters that his experience with the municipal workers compensation board was “one big runaround”.

After being hospitalised in February 2002 and diagnosed with restrictive airway disease, hepatitis C, sinusitis, gastric reflux disease and depression, Mount had to fight for three years to get assistance.

“The attorneys for New York disputed each and every one of my injuries,” he said.

During his time at the World Trade Centre site, Mount was exposed to “an overwhelming amount of smoke, dust and toxic chemicals, as well as human body parts”.

“The paper dust mask – which was all the protection given me – proved to be useless,” he said. Last November, the city terminated Mount’s disability benefits, even though he had several letters from doctors confirming his medical problems.

Rescue workers and clean-up crews were not the only ones in danger. A study by New York University Medical Centre found that 25 percent of Lower Manhattan residents said they were still experiencing “persistent” respiratory symptoms a year after the attacks.

The World Trade Center Health Registry, a government-sponsored survey of over 70,000 people exposed to Ground Zero dust, has also reported high levels of physical and psychological illness.

“I am an example of a Manhattan office worker who will suffer from life-long lung damage because of exposure to World Trade Centre debris,” said Robert Gulack, a senior attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has been chronically sick since he was told it was safe to return to his office one block from the six-story pile of smoking rubble.

After suffering repeated attacks of bronchitis and asthma, Gulack was diagnosed with reactive airway disorder and is currently taking five different prescription drugs for his lungs.

Independent testing performed in January 2003 on the elevators and air systems of his office building found asbestos concentrations of up to 850 times higher than the permissible level.

Gulack is also the representative for the National Treasury Workers Union, and he is pushing the EPA to carry out testing in downtown Brooklyn, where he says that thousands of workers and residents were also exposed.

“As matters now stand, the EPA’s plan for cleaning up the World Trade Centre dust is to have New Yorkers inhale it into their lungs,” he said angrily.

“Three years after we entered the Second World War, we had retaken France…Why was it easier to get the Nazis out of France than to get the EPA into Brooklyn?”