>>The towers required some $200 million in renovations and improvements, most of which related to removal and replacement of building materials declared to be health hazards in the years since the towers were built. It was well-known by the city of New York that the WTC was an asbestos bombshell. For years, the Port Authority treated the building like an aging dinosaur, attempting on several occasions to get permits to demolish the building for liability reasons, but being turned down due the known asbestos problem. Further, it was well-known the only reason the building was still standing until 9/11 was because it was too costly to disassemble the twin towers floor by floor since the Port Authority was prohibited legally from demolishing the buildings.
The projected cost to disassemble the towers: $15 Billion. Just the scaffolding for the operation was estimated at $2.4 Billion!
In other words, the Twin Towers were condemned structures. How convenient that an unexpected “terrorist” attack demolished the buildings completely.<<
>>In all there were about 40,000 people who worked on the pile — a collection of firefighters, policemen, construction and utility workers. One of them was 30-year-old New York City Police Det. James Zadroga. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, he drove straight to ground zero and stayed for weeks. His father, Joseph Zadroga, says he remembers that shortly after that his son started getting sick.
"Every morning he would wake up and he said he would be coughing and hacking, and this black stuff would come up out of his lungs," Det. Zadroga's father remembers. "And he just didn't know what was happening to him. He couldn't figure out what was happening to him."
His doctors didn't know either. Before long, James needed to inhale medication to breathe. And when doctors took a scan of his lung, instead of healthy pink tissue, his was black. Then one morning this past winter, James' father woke up to an unusual silence — his son wasn't coughing.
"I went upstairs and soon as I opened the door, I saw him on the floor. I didn't even have to go in there. I knew he was gone," Joseph Zadroga tells Couric. "And we spent the next two hours with him before we called anybody. And then we had them come to take him."
Asked what the autopsy of his son revealed, Zadroga says, "The doctor said, to the best of his knowledge, that Jimmy died from the results of working at the World Trade Center."
The coroner wrote it on the autopsy report that the failure of James Zadroga's lungs was directly related to 9/11. It was the first time a death had been officially linked to inhaling the dust created when the towers fell. It was an unprecedented toxic brew — approximately 1 million tons of pulverized concrete, glass, asbestos, PCB's, lead and more than 400 chemicals. No one had ever dealt with anything like it.<<
and more.....
cbsnews.com |
