But there were other interests to consider besides science and public health policy. And these factors were seen as equally important at that time. The terrorists hoped to incite panic in the streets. They wanted people to refuse to go back to work on Wall Street. They wanted to see a population on the run, people unwilling to put aside their own interests for any greater good. In such a poisoned atmosphere, a stout heart and firm resolve become weapons of counterterrorism. And that is the message that filtered out of both City Hall and the White House. It became a matter of utmost importance to get the city back on its feet as quickly as possible, and the first step toward achieving that was reopening Wall Street.
That need for normalcy helped set up a struggle between common sense and patriotism, between reasonable caution and willful optimism, between respecting the science and exploiting the science. What ensued was not criminal, nor was it triggered by venality, despite what critics have said. The only conspiracy involved was a conspiracy of purpose. And that purpose was to show those who had supported the terrorists on the jumbo jets that the city, that this country, would not allow the space that had been occupied by the towers to be filled with fear.
For much of the time, that essential message was conveyed by the EPA and its head, Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman was well known to New Yorkers. The former governor had been tapped by President George W. Bush to head the EPA at the beginning of his administration, although in time she would find herself out of step with the hard-core conservatives surrounding Bush. At first Whitman was friendly enough with the Bush family to have given the president and Laura Bush their black Scottish Terrier, Barney. But as Bush moved farther to the right on environmental issues, a gap opened between them. Early in Bush’s first term, Whitman had traveled all over the world representing what she thought was the president’s position on climate control and the Kyoto Treaty, which American business leaders strongly opposed. By the time she returned home, Bush had come out strongly against it. That experience led Colin Powell to refer to Whitman as the administration’s “wind dummy,” a military reference to the way air troopers test the direction of the wind before a jump by throwing a dummy out of the moving plane.6
As the EPA faced its biggest test at ground zero, Whitman was out front, personally releasing some of the test results to the public. She had always been effective on camera, able to cover her political ambition with a patina of honest sincerity. But two major issues would stand in the way of full and honest disclosure: the inadequacy of environmental measurements and the politics of presentation.
The EPA was monitoring the disaster, but it was doing so in an unprecedented vacuum. There were no outdoor standards for airborne asbestos exposure. For as long as asbestos has been considered dangerous, exposure levels were set for indoor spaces, such as factories or school buildings, where breathing in asbestos posed the highest risk. Asbestos fibers resist fire and can hold together plaster or cement in an almost miraculous way. But they are so thin that when they are released into the air, they can be breathed deep into the lungs. Once they get lodged there, they can lead to irritation, inflammation, and, eventually, a range of diseases, including cancer.
Initially, the EPA didn’t know which asbestos safety standards to apply. Confusion even arose over how measurements ought to be taken. Existing regulations were designed for industrial settings, where exposure was intense and lasted for an eight-hour shift or longer. No health-based standards covered the number of asbestos strands in the outside air that would be safe to breathe for days, weeks, or months at a time. The first dust samples analyzed by the EPA showed varying amounts of asbestos, and it was becoming clear that hot spots within the 16 acres of ground zero were more contaminated than others. The agency used standard phase-contrast microscopy, which it had relied on for years. The EPA said that it also utilized more advanced technology—transmission electron microscopy—which can detect much smaller particles with a higher degree of accuracy.
The federal government has established strict workplace standards for asbestos workers exposed to the mineral over a working lifetime. The government also has standards that are used when asbestos-laden insulation is removed from school buildings. In those instances, air samples inside the remediated schools must contain no more than 70 asbestos particles per square millimeter before children are allowed back in. Another standard is in place for determining when asbestos is present in a building and has to be removed. Insulation, floor tiles, and other products that contain at least 1 percent asbestos is officially considered asbestos-containing material and has to be handled as though it is hazardous. Coming in below the 1 percent standard does not indicate that the material is safe. The EPA has long held the position that there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.
None of the existing asbestos exposure standards fit the particular situation that existed at ground zero. But they were all the agency had. And as asbestos continued to be a priority concern in New York, the EPA turned to these standards to help determine the level of risk. Thus, twice each day, the agency collected samples from more than 20 air-monitoring stations at ground zero and the surrounding area. Of more than 9,500 samples analyzed, 21 exceeded the school-safety standard of 70 asbestos particles per square millimeter.7 When the EPA reported on the level of contamination at ground zero, it said that all but a handful of the thousands of samples met the standard for asbestos exposure, even though the agency knew that it had applied a standard that had not been designed for such circumstances.
Still, that is the benchmark against which the air samples had been compared when Whitman stated on September 13, “[The] EPA is greatly relieved to have learned there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City.” Applying the same asbestos standards over the ensuing days, Whitman continually reassured New Yorkers that they needn’t worry too much about the air they were breathing. She did say that the rescue workers who were searching for survivors on the pile itself needed to take precautions because the conditions there were far more dangerous. Sampling taken from directly above the debris showed several hazardous chemicals, including benzene, at relatively high levels. But a short distance away from the rubble, those levels dropped dramatically. Rescue workers were told to wear respirator masks to protect themselves. The EPA had no data on PCBs, small particulate matter or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that were being emitted by the fires, nor had the agency yet studied the synergistic ways those contaminants might act when mixed with asbestos and other toxic materials. But the main thrust of Whitman’s statements, and the message most people got out of them, was that there was nothing to worry about.
After what New York and the nation had been through since the morning of September 11, news that the air was safe was a relief. I can recall being in the newsroom of The New York Times and hearing the reassuring statements about asbestos. Knowing what I know about such contaminants, I found the results difficult to accept. Yet at that moment I was comforted by what I heard because it made moving forward so much easier. I suppose it is like hearing an overly optimistic diagnosis of a loved one who is very sick. It can be clear that the doctor is putting absolutely the best face on the crisis and wouldn’t attest to any of it in court, but he is saying what relatives want to hear, no matter how illogical it seems. As they looked for their dead, New Yorkers did not want to worry about danger in the air.
For many reasons, America’s strongest response to the terror attack was to reopen Wall Street as quickly as possible. That was the priority when President Bush told senior members of his staff that he wanted to see the New York Stock Exchange back in operation by Thursday morning, September 13. But Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill convinced him that the worst outcome of all would be to open the doors of the exchange prematurely, allowing a technical problem to crash the system and creating more havoc while diminishing confidence. At a tense National Security Council meeting on the morning of September 13, O’Neill told Bush that the earliest the exchange co
uld safely and reasonably be reopened would be the following Monday, after a closure of just four working days, including the day of the attack. The president reluctantly agreed to wait.8
To prepare for the reopening, the EPA sent a fleet of specially equipped vacuum trucks to Wall Street to begin the massive job of cleaning up. Rain on Friday, September 14, had already washed away some of the dust. Over the weekend, the vacuum trucks swept the asphalt. But officials were horrified to discover that the contractor who operated the trucks was running them without the high-efficiency HEPA filters needed to pick up the super fine strands of asbestos. The trucks were actually doing more harm than good by disturbing the settled dust and blowing it back into the air. Once the mistake was discovered, the operator was ordered to redo the streets, this time with the proper filters installed. (The company later was suspended from further government work.)
The New York Stock Exchange reopened at its normal time on Monday, September 17. A handful of the employees who reported to work that day wore light dust masks. Most had nothing. To wear a respirator mask while firefighters desperately clawed through the rubble looking for survivors a few yards away struck most people as either selfish or inappropriate, like applying hand sanitizer before responding to a forest fire. But some people in Lower Manhattan did anyway. One of them was Suzanne Mattei, then the head of the New York City office of the Sierra Club. Because of her work, she knew how hazardous the contaminated air could be. And because of previous run-ins with the government, she also believed the EPA’s test results were probably inaccurate or misleading. As she walked to her downtown office wearing a half-face respirator, Mattei could feel the harsh stares of passersby, and eventually they made her feel strangely unpatriotic for taking personal precautions at a time of national tragedy.
The day after Wall Street reopened, Whitman’s office released the most definitive statement yet about environmental conditions in New York. “We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air quality and drinking water conditions in both New York and the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances,” Whitman was quoted in a press release put out by EPA. She then took her reassuring tone even further. “Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” The word public in the statement was the only direct attempt to bifurcate the message by suggesting that there was a significant difference between the public and the rescue workers, who would be mentioned only in the last paragraph of the two-page release. There the agency boasted that it had “assisted efforts to provide dust masks to rescue workers to minimize inhalation of dust.” But it did not say that the dust was laced with hazardous chemicals. The agency did recommend wetting down the debris pile to reduce the dust, and it provided wash stations for workers to clean off before they went home. The responders also were encouraged to wash contaminated clothing separately from “normal household wash.”
It all sounded so domesticated and unthreatening that the overall impact was to simply repeat what Giuliani and Whitman had been saying since the beginning: Most people had almost nothing to worry about. Whitman has said she wanted to keep her message simple. But the way it came across was contradictory, confusing, and so vaguely worded that it was open to many interpretations—and most people clearly wanted it to mean there was no danger. It would be hard for officials to argue that such an ambiguous message was unintended. The EPA is sophisticated at communicating hazards and conveying environmental information. It was especially so in the Bush administration, which tried to control messages about pollution, energy consumption, and global warming. Whitman’s September 18 statement, and all the press releases issued by the EPA during the initial cleanup, were scrubbed by the White House and the Council on Environmental Quality before they were released. In some instances, the Bush White House made subtle word changes that effectively repackaged the message, slimming down the risks while puffing up what the agency said it knew but, in fact, could not have known at that time because it did not yet have the scientific data on which to base those statements. In one of the earliest releases, the EPA’s original wording that it “considers asbestos hazardous in this situation” was changed slightly, but the meaning of the statement was altered substantially. In place of the original, the statement that was released to the public said that the EPA “is greatly relieved to have learned there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City.”9
In an earlier instance, the EPA had initially planned to report on September 16 that some asbestos had been found: “Recent samples of dust gathered by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) on Water Street show higher levels of asbestos in EPA tests.” Apparently believing that this frank statement of fact would be too difficult for traumatized New Yorkers to bear on the day before many were supposed to return to work in the financial district, the Council on Environmental Quality made several edits that rendered it far less frightening and much more reassuring:
The new samples confirm previous reports that ambient air quality meets OSHA standards and consequently is not a cause for public concern. New OSHA data also indicates that indoor air quality in downtown buildings will meet standards. EPA has found variable asbestos levels in bulk debris and dust on the ground, but EPA continues to believe that there is no significant health risk to the general public in the coming days. Appropriate steps are being taken to clean up this dust and debris.10
Although the EPA had been kept out of ground zero for security reasons for 48 hours, and many of the tests Whitman would have needed to see before she could characterize conditions in any reliable way had not been completed by September 18, she nonetheless declared the air safe to breathe. The agency later insisted that Whitman’s statement addressed only long-term health effects, not acute problems like coughs that arose almost immediately. She claimed that her evaluation referred to outdoor air only, not the air inside apartments, offices, and schools. It was not meant to apply to children, the elderly, or anyone who was not healthy, and it referred to asbestos only, not other hazards that might be contained in the dust. For an agency with decades of experience in carefully outlining the environmental hazards of toxic spills and hazardous waste sites, Whitman’s statement was appallingly vague and unclear. A health alert on a high smog day would be more specific than were these pronouncements about one of the nation’s most serious environmental calamities.
A scathing report by the office of the Inspector General for the EPA11 later concluded that Whitman and her agency, their hands forced by the Bush White House, had unrelentingly pushed the overly optimistic message that “the public did not need to be concerned about airborne contaminants caused by the World Trade Center collapse. The reassurances appeared to apply to both indoor and outdoor air.” The report concluded that neither Whitman nor the agency she ran had enough data to support such an upbeat view. The report also found that the White House had tinkered with the final message to address interests that competed with public health, namely national security and the push to reopen the financial houses of Wall Street.
As part of this all-out mission to restore calm to the city and get New York back on its feet, the words and sentiments that Whitman and Giuliani conveyed were absolutely essential. But they sometimes strayed from the truth, and in the months and years to come, they would prove to be consequential for untold thousands of people who took their imprecise message of hope to heart. Critics would come to portray them as outright falsehoods and deliberate lies, the product of political ambition and malicious interference. By March 2002, seven out of every ten New Yorkers who responded to a telephone poll did not believe the agency’s statements.12 A 2003 survey of more than a thousand residents of Lower Manhattan found that despite the EPA’s reassuring words, a majority still worried about the health effects of indoor and outdoor
air contaminated by trade center dust.13 If the air over New York had been tainted by the dust storms of 9/11, then the atmosphere in the city at the time was tainted by the urge to exaggerate and mold perception, to use the tragedy as one side or the other saw fit, regardless of the truth.
What ensued was a tug-of-war between policy and pragmatism. Emergency response plans and scientific analysis called for restraint, control, and sober study. But the calamity of 9/11 was so great that the plans were almost immediately abandoned or chipped away until they barely resembled themselves. Speed became more important than study, conjecture replaced analysis, hope trumped caution. The city needed to be rebuilt, and quickly. If doing so meant something needed to be sacrificed—time, money, the delicate bond of trust between a government and its citizens—then the pragmatists who were in charge were willing to make that sacrifice to ensure the short-term gain, regardless of the long-term cost.
Endnotes
1 Barrett, Wayne, and Dan Collins, Grand Illusion (New York: Harper Collins, 2006); and Pérez-Peña, Richard, “Trying to Command an Emergency When the Emergency Command Center Is Gone,” The New York Times, 12 September 2001, p. 7, accessed at www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/us/day-terror-government-trying-command-emergency-when-emergency-command-center.html?scp=1&sq=Pérez-Pena%20and%20September%2012,%202001&st=cse.
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