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Environmental health: a low priority?
A
primary problem early on, say officials who were there, was confusion about
what kind of event it was: Was it a disaster scene or a public health
emergency; was it a crime scene?
The
nation was reeling from more than an environmental health disaster. Whether the
event constituted an “act of war” or an “act of international terrorism,” as
pundits argued that day, it was the worst assault on America’s soil in its
history—a fact that made the scope of the environmental and public health
challenges posed by the implosion of the buildings and continuing fires seem,
at least for the moment, secondary.
It
was in fact the worst international terrorist event in our nation’s history,
involving four separate but coordinated air hijackings and the killing of more
than 3000 people, including citizens of not just our nation but 78 different
countries.
This
event was not only a human disaster but a crime scene as well, making for
special dynamics, because law enforcement agencies at all levels of government
were involved. “Instead of the usual crowd control concerns of keeping
on-lookers at a distance, these agencies were tasked with the arrest of anyone
who did not follow instructions,” wrote Paul W. O’Brien for the University of
Colorado. “This raised the level of urgency and seriousness to a much higher
level than in many natural disasters.” (9)
So
environmental and health officials and technicians had trouble getting
clearance to get onto the site, say experts like Alison Geyh and Bruce Lippy.
“The authority for Ground Zero changed ten times during the first few weeks
before it became the purview of the Department of Design and Construction,”
says Geyh.
“It
was such a scramble early on, we just said ‘whoa,’ take a deep breath,’” says
Lippy, who adds that the sheer effort of getting badged and approved was a
challenge. “It was impossibly large, with 23 different entrances onto the site.
There was the OEM orange badge, then getting through the FEMA documentation.”
Since
authority for the site rested with uniformed services, the Fire Department as
incident commander, and police as enforcers of crowd control and evidence
collection, it was hard for people doing environmental health enforcement to do
their jobs effectively.
Environmental
health officials like McKinney say they faced difficulties enforcing health
rules with fire department personnel. McKinney says he would flash his Health
Department badge to warn them of the need to make sure that food being handled
safely, or the need for garbage to be properly disposed of. Among the health
problems were the presence of dust and waste everywhere, the greater potential
for rats, he says.
Environmental health may have been overlooked
in the early months because the media, by and large, focused on other, “bigger”
themes related to terrorism, everything from the cultural and geopolitical
issues surrounding the attacks—Islam and the Middle East—the immediate economic
dislocation…
“But
reactions varied from ‘okay’ to real anger,” says McKinney. “Cops are
cops—they’re not used to that [being told what to do].”
Another
main reason why environmental health may have been overlooked in the early
months was that the media, by and large, focused on other, “bigger” themes
related to terrorism, everything from the cultural and geopolitical issues surrounding
the attacks—Islam and the Middle East—the immediate economic dislocation; the
search and rescue operations; the process of criminal investigations and the
suspects. In a paper on the patterns of media coverage of the terrorist
attacks, Christine Rodrigue, (1) a geographer at California State University,
identifies ten main themes—and environment is not one of them.
That’s
surprising considering, at least on the local level, the physical environment
around the World Trade Center had changed drastically—from giant piles of
rubble strewn everywhere to trucks hauling debris to smoke and soot to empty
buildings and displaced residents to the fact that it was difficult to breathe.
“For more than a
year a profound split troubled New York journalists on how to cover and play
this unfamiliar new threat,” according to a memo from the Society of
Environmental Journalists on the issue. “One set of journalists was accused of
being ‘alarmists’ pushing fear to raise ratings; another was accused of being
lapdogs placidly accepting EPA reassurances. Good information was hard to
find.”
 |
Cleanup at Ground Zero. |
“Not
since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in
Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size
task of communicating complex information to a frightened public,” wrote
Stranahan. “All too often after 9/11, however, journalists simply accepted the
party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable
exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched
the lives of thousands.”
The
first to report on the environmental health aspects of the disaster were not The
New York Times but national outlets such as Newsweek, MSNBC, CNN, and
others. The first local reporter to flag discrepancies between official
statements about health risks and independent studies showing otherwise,
however, was Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez, who would write a book
about it, entitled “Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade
Center Collapse” (New Press, 2002).
While
health and environmental issues should have been recognized as big issues,
their full impacts didn’t emerge until later. Agencies really didn’t begin to
manage these issues until about four weeks after the events took place in New
York City. For example, disaster analyst Claire Rubin speaks of “the many
problems and issues connected with the public management of health and
environmental issues that began to emerge about four weeks after the attacks
took place.”
But
all these health effects were coming out as people already returning.
Unfortunately, the “all clear” had already been given. What agency ever
backpedals after it’s made a decision?
While there was plenty of “crisis
intervention” for mental health in those early days and weeks following 9/11,
there wasn’t a corresponding attention to environmental health.
Yet
city officials readily admit that they recognized it as being, besides a
catastrophe on many levels, also an environmental disaster. Immediately, New
York City was calling upon public health experts at universities and in
government for expertise on the environmental hazards at the Ground Zero site
and the neighboring area. The range of hazards was astounding, from asbestos to
heavy metals to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) arising from the
fires.
Some
would say later that environmental health was not accorded enough attention.
While there was plenty of “crisis intervention” for mental health in those
early days and weeks following 9/11 for people in the neighborhood, says health
advocate Claire Barnett, director of the group Healthy Schools Network, there
wasn’t a corresponding attention to environmental health.
"Stuyvesant High School should never have
re-opened until the World Trade Center fires were out and the building
completely cleaned and tested,” says Barnett, contributor to a book, Schools
of Ground Zero, (12) published by Healthy Schools Network and the American
Public Health Association. “That's what smart downtown law firms did. But they
also had the money to make the smart choices.”
The local situation post 9/11 pointed up a
larger national environmental issue, adds Barnett. “No one thinks of or plans
for schools as children's workplaces; there is no system at any level of
government to protect children from environmental hazards.”
Among the schools at Ground Zero, Stuyvesant
took pains to test and clean its premises, after many contentious meetings
between parents and school officials. But to this day, many schools in the area
remain untested and uncleaned, say neighborhood advocates.
Stuyvesant parents and teachers were
particularly concerned because their school stood directly across from a
continuous stream of the trucks unloading hazardous World Trade Center debris
en route to the landfill. The parent association hired its own consultant to
test the air, who found it unacceptable.
On more than half the days between October 9th
and February 2002, according to the consultant’s report, the level of
respirable particulates, or dust, inside the school exceeded EPA guidelines for
children; high levels of lead had also been found. (13)
Asked about the decision to site the barge
there, DOH’s Kelly McKinney admits, “It wasn’t ideal” and that it triggered a
lot of public protest “from an emotional standpoint.” Nevertheless, he adds,
“looking at the challenge of moving 1.3 million tons of debris, sifting it and
cleaning it, I don’t know how they did what they did. The job was done with low
injuries and no fatalities.”
“Where else could we site it [the barge]?” says
McKinney. “No I wouldn’t have wanted to live across from it, but we had guys
inspecting to make sure tarps covered the trucks and there was a tremendous
amount of data collected on the dust.”
However,
the World Trade Center dust never quite settled in the public’s mind.
“Environmental health issues were the ones that emerged and became more
relevant and intense as time went on,” McKinney concedes.
Neighborhood
resident Kim Todd survived the blast but lived to endure a shot of ailments
connected to breathing the air and dust. Her case is unusual in that she
breathed the high particulate counts of September 11 and 12 found in evidence
that day. But how many others that weren’t evacuated also suffered? And in
retrospect, did the city give the all-clear to return prematurely?
“I
am extremely reluctant to criticize what anyone did in the first few days,”
says Phil Landrigan. It was an unprecedented disaster for which the city could
never have been prepared.” However, the leadership over the next few weeks and
months for health and safety should have addressed public and occupational
health far better than it did, he argued.
Like
many, he acknowledges that the responses to the attacks on the World Trade
Center involved, as he put it, “extraordinary heroism.”
“They
demonstrated the ability of the American health care system and of individual
public health workers to respond magnificently to an unprecedented crisis,”
wrote Landrigan, remarks in a paper, “The Aftermath of September 11th-
Lessons Learned for Public Health.”
Nevertheless,
the environmental response, he argues, “underscored deep problems in the
nation’s public health infrastructure.”
Footnotes:
1)
An early number given
10,000 -- Early number given by U.S. Rep. Jim Moran of the possible dead in the
World Trade Center. An estimated 30,000 to 50,000 might have been in or near
the center's twin towers when they were hit by hijacked jetliners Tuesday
morning. How many of them escaped before the 110-story buildings collapsed soon
after remained unknown.
http://www.greatdreams.com/trade_day2.htm>>
(2)http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/sbw/sessions_1_2/pdfs/bernard.pdf
(4)
http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr140/qr140.html
(5) http://www.ochealthinfo.com/newsletters/whatsup/2001/01-11.pdf
(6)EPA Response to
9-11, Pentagon Environmental Monitoring Summary
http://www.epa.gov/wtc/pentagon-air-sampling.htm
(7)
Klitzman,
Susan, and Freudenberg, Nicholas, “Implications of the World Trade Center Attack for
the Public Health and Health Care Infrastructures,” American Journal of Public Health. 2003; 93: 400-406
(8)
U.S.
State Department, http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01100304.htm
October 3, 2001
(9)
Paul
W. O’Brien, Institutional Warning Response Following the
September 11th World Trade Center Attack, Natural Hazards Research and
Applications Information Center University of Colorado http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr150/qr150.html
(10)
Rodrigue,
Christine, “Patterns of Media Coverage of the Terrorist Attacks on the United
States in September of 2001.” http://www.nyu.edu/icis/Recovery/pubs/rodrigue-update01.pdf
(11)
Stranahan,
Susan, “Air of Uncertainty,” American Journalism Review http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2746
(12)
Schools of Ground Zero: Early Lesson Learned in Children’s Environmental
Health, by Sarah Bartlett and John Patrarca, a joint publication of the
American Public Health Association and Healthy Schools Network, 2002.
(13)
Schools of Ground Zero, p. 28.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm51SPa2.htm