Air Quality: Mike Weiss progress memo

I am trying to find out what the EPA did wrong on air monitoring at 9/11, and if they have taken measures to correct this. When then tell me “yes, we have improved all our procedures,” I will ask them for details.

A lot of the air monitoring problems from 9/11 appear to have come from a mis-diagnoses of the potentially harmful effects of concrete and glass particles in the air – an unforeseen circumstance, when most monitoring was looking for asbestos fibers. This brings up the issue of whether the current air monitoring (which has reverted back to EPA standards for non-emergency situations) is flexible enough to respond to the new situation of intense construction-related air hazards in lower Manhattan.

I have spoken with several scientists, doctors, government officials, and Joel Kupferman, a lawyer with the NY Environmental Law & Justice Project. There is also an event this Sunday sponsored by the group “9/11 Environmental Action” titled The 9/11 Community Health Forum. The event, at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, states that “affected workers, residents and students will be joined by 9/11-experienced doctors & elected officials.” I’m going.

Some cool quotes: Lynda Caspe, a resident of 150 Franklin Street (just below Canal Street) hired Joel Kupferman to look into her problem of accumulated 9/11 dust on the roof of her building. Through a series of comical blunders by the city’s DOH and then the EPA, her building was finally cleaned by the EPA. When asked if she felt the government could now be trusted to truthfully monitor air quality, she said, “I believed George Bush when he said there were weapons of mass destruction – so you know there’s something wrong with my mind!”

Also, there is an obscure program of Cornell University that is based in New York City called the Cornell Cooperative Extension. The director of the program, Gretchen Ferenz, explained how the program was established by an ancient law that mandates a land-grant program from a college in every county of New York State to run educational programs related to the use of land or the environment. As a research project, the program just happened to want to measure the effect that trees and other landscaping were having on particulate matter (air particles) and found that trees had very little effect at all. Part of their research had them comparing their air samples with those of the State’s air monitoring stations and found discrepancies – specifically, there was much more particulate matter in the air at ground level (where people breathe) than there was on the rooftops where the State’s Dept. of Environmental Conservation monitoring stations are located. Ferenz was adamant about not making any speculations about human health consequences, “what the toxins are, I can’t speak to that,” but said “the levels are different. Let’s just say the rooftop levels are consistent and don’t change, but what we found at intersections, when the light changes – zoooooom, the readings are off the chart.”