It's official: post 9-11 air contamination in NY [View All]

[rman]

Democracy Now
Thursday, August 24th, 2006
Memo: NY City Hall Divided Over Handling of Post-9/11 Contamination
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/24/207231

...internal memo from a top official in the Health Department who was in charge of environmental hazards and who was coordinating the city's response to 9/11 on health issues, and also the deputy -- the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, who was actually doing all the testing for asbestos throughout the city; both of them were very concerned about the air quality in Lower Manhattan and, in fact, were overruled by City Hall, by Mayor -- the Giuliani administration, their boss, who wanted to open up more areas around ground zero, because he was under pressure, according to the assistant commissioner, from the business community and building owners to allow more opening of areas around ground zero.

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But even more importantly, some of the data of the city's testing, which again has never gotten much attention and in fact the city withheld and is still withholding from public release some of those main tests, showed that in the five days after 9/11, before hundreds of thousands of people were given the all-clear to come back to work, that the city took 38 air tests in Lower Manhattan for asbestos and of those 38 tests, 27 of them, more than 70% of the tests that the city took, showed unsafe levels of asbestos in the air. And yet the city not only took months to post those results, but then when they did on their website, have still not posted the worst results that they got in the first few days. So there's real questions about actual withholding and burying of damaging air safety reports.
And yet the public was told everything is okay, it's okay to go back to work in that area.

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