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Published on Wednesday, September 3, 2003 by the Chicago Tribune
Outrage and a 2nd Anniversary
Air Quality Suffered After Sept. 11
by Carol Marin
Good guys tell the truth.
Bad guys don't.
Isn't that right?
Then somebody better explain that to the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House.
You might have missed the story because it broke last week, at a time when many of us were away grabbing one last gasp of vacation.
The headlines sum it up. "Toxic deception" wrote The Baltimore Sun. "Trust left in the dust" declared the Los Angeles Times.
The reports have to do with how the EPA, at the urging of the White House, misled the public about air quality in New York City following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And the damning evidence doesn't come from some partisan politician or investigative reporter. It comes from the EPA itself and its own internal watchdog, the inspector general.
The nut of the story is this: Immediately after the terrorist attack in New York City, the White House strong-armed the EPA and told it to play down any talk about just how polluted the air might have become.
When Christie Todd Whitman, then the head of the EPA, assured the public just days after the attacks that the air was safe to breathe, she had little or no scientific evidence to back it up. The EPA did not even begin testing dust and debris until 10 days after the attack. And even then some particle samples weren't taken until October when some clean-up had already taken place.
What's worse, much worse, is how the White House, through its Council on Environmental Quality, reached in to rewrite EPA press releases in order to, according to the inspector general, "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones." Like the line the White House took out saying, "Even at low levels, EPA considers asbestos hazardous in this situation." When it came to asbestos levels, the White House preferred to say asbestos levels were "not a cause for public concern."
Why?
"National security and a desire to reopen Wall Street" says the inspector general.
It's mind-boggling.
Even though we have all seen the attacks and aftermath of Sept. 11 re-rerun on television dozens, if not hundreds, of times, I watch it each time as though it's the first time.
Even now, almost two years after the attack on the World Trade Center, I have trouble remembering with precision all the tiny details of that day.
Part of the reason, experts tell me, is that if you're running for your life, you focus on surviving, not on observing.
Working for "CBS News" in New York that day, I raced to the scene just after the terrorists flew two passenger planes into the World Trade Center's twin towers and was less than two blocks away when the north tower roared and shuddered and blew into billions of big and little bits that came crashing down.
Within seconds, the morning light went black as night. It was impossible to see and nearly impossible to breathe. The air was a dense micro-dust of pulverized furniture and fixtures mixed with the tragic ashes of all the people trapped inside. Everyone that day and every day that followed wondered what was in the air and in the inches of white, ashy dust that settled outside on the ground, inside apartments and in our own lungs. We now know the laundry list of possibilities: asbestos, PCBs, chromium, benzene, mercury, lead, glass and concrete.
But early on we had EPA's assurances that the air quickly cleared and the exposure and contamination risk was low-level at best.
I want to believe my government when it tells me something.
So do the 6,100 patients of Dr. Steven Levin of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. The health of these patients is now under study. Levin told Newsday last week that "People went back to their apartments because Christie Todd Whitman said it was safe. I have patients who knew it was wrong--they could feel it. But their employer said, `The EPA says it's safe.' If I have outrage over anything this is it. Who do you believe? If you can't trust the EPA, it's a terrible consequence for public health."
Marianne Lamont Horinko, who replaced Whitman and is the EPA's acting head, dismisses and discounts her own inspector general's findings, telling The New York Times "It's almost like an academic look at an average emergency, and 9/11 wasn't academic or average." The White House's role, she argues, was overblown.
But no one, not even Horinko, can say what the long-term and lasting health consequences of Sept. 11 will be. Experts say it will take years to know.
Then there's the matter of public trust.
There are only so many times a public can be told something by its government, only to find out later it's not true.
As we approach the second anniversary of the terror attacks on Sept. 11, it's worth remembering that good guys tell the truth.
Carol Marin is a Chicago journalist and former CBS correspondent.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune |
