Progress Memo: Mike Weiss, Air Quality

More interviews with:
Dave Newman, New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)
Dr. Steven Markowitz, Dir. of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College

Both were on EPA’s WTC Expert Technical Review Panel, a group which was created in 2004 after Senator Clinton’s insistence that EPA take a greater role in the cleanup of indoor spaces surrounding the WTC site. The panel met for 18 months and was eventually disbanded by the EPA with no clear recommendations.

Steven Markowitz tells me:
1. Currently New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation is monitoring air quality in lower Manhattan. They are doing this from the tops of buildings, and when asked if shouldn’t someone be monitoring air quality at ground level he says no, they are doing the appropriate job.
2. Responsibility for monitoring air quality will be transferred to the NYC Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene under something called “The Mayor’s PLAN for NYC.”
3. If I really want to see how air quality monitoring is done, I should go to the lab of George Thurston, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, NYU. Then he tries to steer me away from this saying, “it will be really boring.”

Interview with Joel Kupferman, Executive Director of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project. Kupferman tells me:
1. A lot of so-called environmental scientists are biased in favor of their organizations. Of course air quality monitoring should be conducted at street level. Kupferman offers to give me the contact info for an independent scientist.
2. Kupferman emails me six documents including an article from the organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) detailing the ways the New York Times assisted in the dangerously negligent job of under-reporting the air hazards at 9/11. Other reports detail Kupferman’s office’s law suit against former head of EPA Christine Todd Whitman, as well as reports showing the federal government’s laxity in aggressively pursuing environmental safety and actively assisting in the cover-up to avoid responsibility.

I plan on finding the locations where the state is monitoring air quality in lower Manhattan and try to get access to their data. Then I plan on working with an independent scientist to monitor air quality in the same locations as the state’s, only taking readings from the ground. Then compare the two.