| Title Page Previous Next Contents | Part 2. The day after: How officials responded >Biggest vacuum: Respirators |
But
the biggest environmental problem was the air rescue workers were breathing at
Ground Zero, says Burger, who had experienced the unforgettable, sweet acrid
smell himself there on the second night.
“You
had a nightmare here—everyone wanting to help and driving through the night to
get to New York,” recalls Burger. “Anyone could get in there before they set up
these check points. They’d say, ‘I drove here all night for the past two nights,’
and would do anything to find a place on ‘the pile.’
But
these volunteers needed to be convinced to wear respirators, says Burger,
because in their grief they were reluctant to.
That
was a very understandable reaction, first responders agree. “It was tough to
get guys to wear masks and to operate with any responsible protection in this
strenuous environment,” says Anthony Sutton, director of Emergency Management
in Westchester County, N.Y. “Their brothers and friends were in there and they
wanted to get them out because that’s what they’d want done for them.” Mark
Penn, director of Arlington County, Virginia’s Emergency Management Office
agrees. “If I’d a been there, I would have been there on my knees too.”
However,
both local officials and CDC personnel quickly recognized that the occupational
health issues affecting rescue workers were not being managed, such as fitting
workers for particulate masks and monitoring the safety of their food supply.
Together they began to develop a comprehensive worker health and safety
program, says Meehan. “The Health Department took it upon itself but the
dilemma was enforcement. They were trying to balance the need for workers to be
protected with personal protective equipment vs. their personal emotional needs.”
The
city also got help from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH), a part of the CDC, who sent industrial hygienists with
technical expertise to help assign proper respiratory protection. The city DOH,
led by McKinney had arrived for the first time down on the pile September 13th,
leading a group of 15 hygienists from NIOSH to test what workers were being
exposed to. From the first personal sample readings, says McKinney, the city
had determined that “Everyone who works on the pile needs to wear P100
dual-cartridge half-face respirators with combined Organic Vapor/ Acid Gas
(OV/AG) filter cartridges.”
“If
it weren’t for the local environmental health department there would have been
little done,” says Burger. “They shone in the emergency response to the WTC
disaster.”
As
time wore on, though, with responsibility for worker protection confused as
authority shifted to the Department of Design and Construction, compliance with
respiratory use failed. “Kelly and I looked at each other and said, ‘It’s not
getting done,’’ says Burger.
No
one could say with any certainty how long the process of recovery would
take—nor how difficult the process of protecting workers would be.