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I know this is an old article but I wanted to share in case anyone still thinks Rudy Giuliani is still a hero.
"On Sept. 17, 2001, less than one week after the World Trade Center collapse, tens of thousands of office workers returned to their jobs near Ground Zero after receiving the go-ahead from federal and local safety officials.
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Initially, the various health agencies also withheld from the public most results of their environmental testing. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) refused outright to release the data, claiming that the test results were part of a "criminal investigation" -- presumably the Sept. 11 hijackings -- and the city has yet to release all of its data.
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The nation's top environmental official, Christie Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who had given her preliminary endorsement of the reopening a few days earlier, issued an official statement of approval on Sept. 18. "I am glad to reassure the people of New York ... that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink," she announced
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Similar assurances were given by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the New York City Department of Health. Even as they made those statements, however, officials knew that their own preliminary environmental tests of the air, dust and water in Lower Manhattan had revealed some troubling readings.
The tests found that considerable amounts of asbestos and heavy metals had been detected in dust samples throughout the area. Within a few weeks, officials would also receive the first results of aerial surveys conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) pinpointing the precise locations of hundreds of asbestos "hot spots" on rooftops, buildings and streets throughout the area, including some that were half a mile or more from the collapsed buildings. Before the end of September, the USGS would also report that dust on the ground and in the air downtown was highly caustic, with alkalinity levels that made it as potent as household drain cleaner. Health officials withheld this information from the public for several months.
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EPA officials and fire-fighting experts were well aware, from previous studies of a handful of spectacular and tragic fires in hotels, commercial buildings and downtown areas, that such blazes are capable of releasing a witch's brew of some of the most toxic substances known -- including mercury, benzene, lead, chlorinated hydrocarbons and dioxins. Despite this prior knowledge, federal officials rushed to dismiss or understate potential health dangers to the public and rescue workers at the site during those first few days.
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The federal government has never established ambient safety levels for many of the contaminants detected in air samples taken around Ground Zero. Instead of admitting they had no certainty of what danger these substances might cause, EPA risk experts at the New York regional headquarters devised ad hoc safety "benchmarks" or "removal action guidelines." They then misled the public into believing these were federally approved safety levels and reported that only a few of their test results were above these levels.
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Nearly 50 percent of those questioned reported physical problems likely to be related to the Trade Center collapse, such as nose, throat and eye irritation, and 40 percent said they were suffering from persistent coughing. Like other disturbing information about the environment around Ground Zero, the public never heard much about this survey. The results were released quietly by the health department in a press release late one Friday afternoon in January 2002 -- three months after it had been conducted -- and received virtually no media attention
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"What happened here is at the level of Watergate," says Dr. Marjorie Clarke, scientist-in-residence at Lehman College in New York and an expert on dioxin and furan emissions from incinerators. "They covered up important information. It just seems to me that, from the get go, a decision had been made from some high-up government types that there is not going to be a problem here."
Federal health and safety officials were not alone in misleading the public, however. Mayor Giuliani, New York City Health Commissioner Neal Cohen and Joseph Miele of the city's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) abandoned their responsibility to safeguard the public's health and grossly neglected safety issues for thousands of rescue workers at Ground Zero."
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