http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/09/10/MN266317.DTL
Wednesday, September
10, 2003
San Francisco Chronicle
9.11.01: Two
years later
Ground zero air quality was 'brutal' for months
UC Davis scientist concurs that EPA reports misled the public
Jane Kay, Chronicle
Environment Writer
A UC Davis scientist
who led the air monitoring of the smoldering
ruins of the World Trade Center said dangerous levels of pollutants
were swirling about the site at the same time the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency assured the public that the air was safe to
breathe.
Thomas Cahill, a professor
emeritus of physics and atmospheric
science, headed the scientific team that studied the aerosols
from
the fuming site in lower Manhattan during the weeks right after
Sept. 11, 2001.
In an interview Tuesday,
Cahill called the conditions for people
working at ground zero without respirators "brutal"
and said
conditions were only slightly better for those working or living
in adjacent buildings.
"The site was
hot for months. The metals burned into fine particles.
They rose in a plume and moved over people's heads on most days.
There were at least eight days when the plume was pushed down
into the city. Then people tasted it, smelled it and saw it.
But people who worked in the pile were getting it every day.
The workers are the ones that I worry about most," Cahill
told
The Chronicle.
Cahill's data found
that the pollution included very fine metals,
which interfere with lung chemistry; sulfuric acid, which attacks
lung cells; carcinogenic organic matter; and very fine insoluble
particles such as glass, which travel through the lungs and into
the bloodstream and heart.
He is expected to present
his latest findings at a national
meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York today.
Cahill's comments echo
a report issued in August by the
EPA inspector general, an internal watchdog on the agency.
The inspector general concluded that under White House influence,
the EPA issued misleading assurances that there was no health
risk from air pollution after the attack.
A week after the attack,
the EPA announced that the air near
ground zero was safe to breathe, but the agency did not have
enough information to make such a guarantee, the inspector
general's report said.
"Christie Whitman
was too premature to say it was safe,"
Cahill said Tuesday. "I think the EPA should have known.
The EPA had its own reports saying it could be dangerous.
Why didn't the EPA bring in their own people from all over
the country? They could have. Never thought of it. They
did later. But not in the time that mattered."
WHITE
HOUSE PRESSURE
The White House "convinced
EPA to add reassuring statements
and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security
Council control EPA communications, the inspector general's
report found.
Marianne Horinko, EPA
acting administrator, has defended
her agency's post-Sept. 11 statements about air quality,
saying the agency put out "the best information we had,
based on just the best data that we had available at the time."
The EPA's public messages
stand at the center of the confirmation
of Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to replace former EPA administrator
Whitman, who resigned in May.
Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton, D-N.Y., pledged last week to block
his appointment unless the White House takes responsibility
for telling the EPA to disseminate misleading reassurances.
Cahill heads the DELTA
Group, which stands for Detection and
Evaluation of Long-range Transport of Aerosols, an association
of scientists at several universities and national laboratories.
The U.S. Energy Department asked the group to monitor air
quality in New York. The group has studied global transport
of aerosols from the Gulf War oil fires in Kuwait in 1991,
volcanoes, dust storms and worldwide factory emissions in China.
HEALTH CONCERNS
In the two years since
the attack, thousands of New Yorkers
have contacted the World Trade Center health registry,
reporting cases of persistent coughs, wheezing, shortness
of breath and sinus inflammation.
A year ago, the New
York Fire Department reported that
up to 500 employees may have to retire early as a result
of respiratory disability or chronic breathing problems
caused by their exposure to dense clouds of dust, smoke
and fumes at the site.
Cahill's first report
in 2002, based on 8,000 air samples
collected a mile from the complex, found high levels of very
fine airborne particles that could increase risk of lung damage
and heart attacks.
The new data confirm
four classes of pollutants at levels higher
than what Cahill's group found in Kuwait or China, Cahill said.
Tons of concrete, glass, furniture, carpets, insulation, computers
and paper were reduced to debris piles that burned for three months.
In that hot pile, some
of the elements combined with organic
matter and abundant chlorine from papers and plastics and
then escaped to the surface as metal-rich gases. They burned
or chemically decomposed into very fine particles capable
of penetrating deeply into human lungs, Cahill said.
E-mail Jane Kay at
jkay@sfchronicle.com.
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