Air of Uncertainty,
Coverage of potential health problems near Ground Zero was slow to develop, as many news organizations simply accepted the reassurances of the EPA. The episode underscores the difficulty of covering questions with no clear answers.
Susan Q. Stranahan is a freelance journalist in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. For 28 years, she wrote about environmental issues for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her stories were a major component in the Inquirer’s coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting.
On the morning of 9/11, columnist Juan Gonzalez of New York's Daily News was in Brooklyn, covering the city's mayoral primary, when he heard about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He headed on foot toward lower Manhattan, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as the second tower collapsed. Arriving at Ground Zero, he began interviewing people. "It was pitch-black in lower Manhattan in the middle of the day," he remembers. "It was obvious there was a lot of pretty nasty stuff in the air." He would be the first to report on just how nasty it was.
Newsday's Laurie Garrett was on the Brooklyn Bridge when the towers collapsed. "You saw this massive amount of stuff coming down," she says. It struck her as odd that people were spitting out the dust and blowing their noses, but not coughing. She wondered why.
Christine Haughney, a 1999 Columbia University J-school grad who works as an editorial aide in the Washington Post's New York bureau, raced to the scene via subway. Almost instantly, she was coated with soot. Later, when Bureau Chief Michael Powell told her to follow the air pollution angle, she eagerly agreed. "It seemed a logical story," she says.
Andrew Schneider, deputy assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, listened carefully as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman proclaimed two days after the attack that "there appears to be no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air in New York City." He'd seen photos of the scene and knew a lot about toxic materials. "What everybody was saying didn't make sense," he says.
In the first weeks and months after the disaster, questions about health concerns from the World Trade Center collapse took a back seat to reporting on global terrorism, heroic acts and the loss of life. As time wore on, however, it became the story of concern to tens of thousands of New Yorkers and others.
Yet coverage has been inconsistent, ranging from repeated reassurances that the air is safe to fearsome headlines about toxins and cancer. That disparity--along with early suspicions about bias and motives on the part of government and the media--left Manhattan residents distrustful of what they were told. And hungry for answers that may not be known for years.
Not since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size task of communicating complex information to a frightened public. As at TMI, officials in New York were loath to concede they were in the dark, and as a result, offered erroneous and misleading information about the situation. Like TMI, the best stories often lay hidden in inconsistent statements and arcane technical data--awaiting discovery by curious reporters.
All too often after 9/11, however, journalists simply accepted the party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched the lives of thousands. "This was as difficult an environmental health assignment as you can get," says Eric A. Goldstein, who tracks air-quality issues as head of the Natural Resources Defense Council's New York Urban Program. The subject was extremely complex, but it also was politically delicate. "How far should the media go in highlighting facts that raise uncomfortable ambiguities on health issues at a time when America seemed to be under attack?" For both reasons, says Goldstein, who followed government response and related news accounts, "it took a while [for the media] to get their bearings."
Jonathan Bennett of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a coalition of labor unions and worker safety activists, also tracked the coverage; he has been e-mailing news stories and government documents to more than 300 reporters since shortly after September 11. "A lot of important information hasn't been well communicated to the people who needed to have it," says Bennett. "The media in New York have not been particularly interested."
That view is shared by Alyssa Katz, editor of City Limits, a nonprofit magazine about New York City affairs. On 9/11, she watched as a giant plume of smoke passed over her Brooklyn house. "The whole neighborhood was raining paper and dust." As the months passed and health complaints among New Yorkers mounted, she thought her colleagues were missing an obvious story. Asked by an editor at The American Prospect to analyze the coverage for the magazine, her late-February article pulled no punches. "If government officials hoped to minimize fears that lower Manhattan was no longer a safe place to live or work, they had plenty of help from New York's media." The exception, she wrote, was Juan Gonzalez at the Daily News.
Public health experts also found in-depth coverage of the subject lacking. Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, says he found the New York Times' coverage initially to be soft. "In the early weeks, they were awfully reassuring. Their first reaction was to dismiss the possibility of asbestos."
"Reporters have to be sophisticated thinking through the motives of government officials," he adds. "Why did Christie Whitman say on day two that there was no asbestos hazards, a position at variance with her own agency's data?"
Landrigan, who was often interviewed on the health risks, thinks the Times' coverage improved as debate grew over the safety of returning to contaminated apartments. "Serious mistakes were made" in the haste to get people back into their homes, he believes. The premature return--and bungled advice from the city of New York on proper decontamination of those homes--might result in a few additional cases of cancer, he says. Otherwise, Landrigan believes, the risk of long-term health problems for those living and working in lower Manhattan is not high, "but it's not zero, either."
Clearly, everyone was maneuvering through uncharted territory. That includes environmental experts, public health authorities, government leaders and, of course, journalists.
"We have no precedent to turn to, no scientific model," says Newsday's prize-winning science and medical writer Laurie Garrett. Even so, she says, the subject is "a damn big story" that the media have been slow to pursue.
The New York Times' metro environment reporter Kirk Johnson agrees with Garrett on one point: "No one had ever been anywhere like this before." As a result, he says, "there's no huge base of knowledge to fall back on." For example, will short-term exposures like those that occurred near the World Trade Center produce health problems years later? No one knows.
Johnson says one principle dictated the Times' coverage--"To make sure we knew what we were talking about."
From the outset, the Times relied heavily on statements from federal authorities.
Three days after 9/11, the paper offered this assessment: "[T]ests of air and the dust coating parts of Lower Manhattan appeared to support the official view expressed by city, state and federal health and environmental officials: that health problems from pollution would not be one of the legacies of the attacks. Tests of air samples taken downwind of the smoldering rubble...disclosed no harmful levels of asbestos, lead or toxic organic compounds, officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday."
That was what the experts--and the Times--continued to repeat long afterward.
Trouble was, months after the terrorist attacks, thousands of lower Manhattan residents and workers were hacking and wheezing; their homes and offices were loaded with powdery residues; private testing of building interiors showed worrisome amounts of asbestos; and they just weren't buying that line--no matter how many times they heard it. "There was a real disconnect between what government was saying and what a lot of people were experiencing," says the NRDC's Goldstein.
Consider stories published over three days in 2002. On September 29, Kirk Johnson transported Times readers back a half-century to a six-day air-pollution siege in Manhattan that bore an uncanny resemblance to conditions immediately after the terrorist attacks. "A dry, wheezing, watery-eyed cough became common," he wrote. "Smoke and haze drifted across the region."
Johnson's anecdotal lead that Sunday was intended to illustrate "how little science knew" about the health effects of air pollution on New Yorkers in the 1950s. "If air pollution victims in 1953 were in the dark because they couldn't know," wrote Johnson, "some Manhattan residents now are perhaps just as in the dark because of what they cannot accept."
The next day, Newsday launched a two-part series, starting with "City Struggles to Contend with Widespread WTC Cough," written by Garrett. (Delthia Ricks wrote the other story, "Assessing the Scope of WTC Ailments.") Although both articles were full of caveats about what science didn't know about the cause of the respiratory afflictions, they provided fascinating insights into the chemistry of the dust and its impact on the human lung. Garrett also reported that the EPA's air-testing program, designed to measure asbestos levels or other toxins, "may be inappropriately focused." Microscopic bits of glass may pose a far greater health hazard than the experts originally believed, she wrote.
The Times and Newsday stories are just one example of widespread disparities in tone and substance. A review of nearly 200 news stories written about health implications for those near Ground Zero reveals other significant differences--and some major lapses. On occasion, reporters forgot journalism's First Commandment: If it doesn't ring true, figure out why. Often, they didn't recognize another commandment, inherent to the World Trade Center health stories: Some questions have no immediate answers, and that's news, too.
About 10 days after the World Trade Center attacks, the Daily News' Juan Gonzalez got a phone call from Joel Kupferman, head of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, a shoestring public-interest firm.
Kupferman told Gonzalez he had had dust samples from near Ground Zero analyzed by two private companies. The tests showed levels of asbestos up to five times higher than federal safety guidelines. They also detected significant amounts of fiberglass. At the time, federal and city officials were urging residents and workers to return to their homes and offices near Ground Zero. Schools in the neighborhood were set to reopen. Was Gonzalez interested?
Kupferman's information confirmed Gonzalez's suspicions. "My gut instincts told me the [EPA] statements just couldn't be based on any kind of accurate assessment," he says. "I wanted to look a little more." So did Kupferman; he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the EPA's testing data.
On September 28, Gonzalez detailed Kupferman's findings in a column headlined "Health Hazards in Air Worry Trade Center Workers." Five days later, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began posting outdoor air-quality measurements around lower Manhattan on their Web sites. In a press release, Whitman said: "Our data show that contaminant levels are low or nonexistent, and are generally confined to the Trade Center site. There is no need for concern among the general public...." By then, tens of thousands of Financial District workers and thousands more residents had returned to their dust-filled offices and homes.
By October 9, when Gonzalez again took up the asbestos topic, the Times, Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Daily News (in its news columns) had also tackled rising public concerns about air quality. The AP and the Daily News quoted federal officials saying the levels of asbestos and other contaminants near Ground Zero posed no health risks. Newsweek, however, reported there was "more asbestos at [the] disaster site than previously revealed," according to an independent air-quality testing firm. The magazine raised the prospect that the EPA was using less-sophisticated testing equipment than the private contractors and thus was not detecting pulverized fibers prevalent at Ground Zero.
The Times' Susan Saulny and Andrew C. Revkin, a health-science reporter, wrote on October 6: "The Environmental Protection Agency has tested the air in Lower Manhattan more than 1,000 times and has concluded that it does not show dangerous levels of contamination." However, they added, "The intense fear of contaminated air has spread throughout downtown and taken on a life of its own, despite repeated assurances by the authorities, becoming one of the more unexpected and unmanageable side effects of the trade center disaster."
Gonzalez's October 9 column picked up on Newsweek's lead. "Asbestos contamination inside buildings near the World Trade Center site may be far worse than government officials have reported...," he wrote. By now, he had the results of the same private toxicology tests Newsweek cited. Those tests were performed for the owner of two office buildings near Ground Zero, and the private monitors were finding asbestos the feds were missing. According to EPA spokeswoman Mary Mears, those tests involved vacuuming fibers out of carpets; there is no requirement for the EPA to perform this level of extraction. All health guidelines, the agency notes, are based on ambient air levels of asbestos.
"Even as they were reassuring the public," Gonzalez told his readers, "EPA officials distributed respirators late last week to their employees in the Federal Building...a few blocks from the Trade Center site."
Two days later, the Times published "Air Quality: Contaminants Below Levels for Long-Term Concerns," by Johnson and Revkin. Independent air tests commissioned by the Times concluded that "outdoor street level air in the vicinity of the trade center site does not contain poisons or toxic substances, especially lead and asbestos, in levels sufficient to raise long-term public health concern." Those findings "essentially mirrored" EPA findings, the paper reported.
The newspaper decided to do its own testing, Johnson said later, because "we had so many people calling me and the Times saying they didn't believe what the government [or anyone else] was reporting."
However, he adds, "I don't know that that reassured anybody."
Throughout his reporting, Johnson says, he tried to clearly differentiate the two groups at risk: those at Ground Zero and those a short distance away. "The scientific evidence does support a cautiously optimistic outcome for the vast majority of people who were not exposed for extended periods at Ground Zero," says Johnson. "That is a wholly separate thing from Ground Zero.... [And] that's where journalism has gotten in trouble on this." (Gonzalez also wrote about both areas, and made distinctions.)
At the Daily News in late October, Gonzalez was eyeing 800 pages of raw data, the response to Joel Kupferman's FOIA request. The numbers showed high levels of contaminants--PCBs, benzene, lead and chromium--at monitoring sites around lower Manhattan, as well as at Ground Zero. Kupferman was itchy to get the data out to the public; Gonzalez wanted more time to assess the numbers, which seemed at odds with everything the EPA was saying.
Uncertain what to do, Gonzalez sought advice from his boss, then-Metro Editor Richard Pienciak, who as an AP reporter had covered the Three Mile Island accident and many environmental and pollution issues. Pienciak reviewed the reams of data and helped Gonzalez make sense of the significance of the numbers.
Gonzalez led the October 26 Daily News with a column on the high readings documented in the FOIA results. The headline: "Toxic Nightmare at Disaster Site."
"That unleashed a firestorm," says Gonzalez, who adds, "I wasn't too happy with the headline. It was a little too tabloidy."
EPA and city officials immediately attacked the column as irresponsible and a misinterpretation of testing data. Five days later, the News published an op-ed article by the EPA's Whitman defending her agency and saying the high readings cited by Gonzalez were taken out of context.
As the controversy flared, Gonzalez says he felt the heat from inside, too. "From that day on, the whole attitude toward the story changed. I did several more columns, but every one of them was highly scrutinized." He was assigned to a variety of editors.
Edward Kosner, editor in chief at the Daily News, says the change of editors and closer scrutiny were warranted because of the "investigative" nature of Gonzalez's columns, especially in light of complaints from City Hall and the EPA. "At the same time they were beefing, we wanted to make sure that our stories were as double-riveted as they could be."
Did he have concerns about Gonzalez's take on the data? "Maybe more interpretation was put on those readings than perhaps they deserved," he says. "Maybe [the high readings] were temporary spikes," and not reflective of general conditions--the point made by Whitman in her op-ed. In the end, however, Kosner's view of the column was reflected in its placement. "It was a good story. That's why we put it on page one."
Gonzalez stuck with the subject, learning as he went. "There are no federal safety levels for most of these contaminants," he says. "The EPA tried to portray that they had the situation under control, when the reality was, they didn't."
The agency should have leveled with people about possible risks, he says, "and let them make up their own minds. When you tell people there's nothing to worry about and [that] everything is OK, you're lying to them. To me, that was the big problem."
The same day Daily News readers were greeted by the "Toxic Nightmare" column, New York Times readers saw this story: "Air quality in Lower Manhattan has gradually improved since the early days.... But at certain times, under certain conditions--usually for brief periods--the bad air still returns.... [M]ost people need not worry."
At the Times, which won four Pulitzers for its terrorism coverage, reporters Johnson and Revkin worked their sources to better understand the complexities. "It came down to what we know and what we don't know," says Revkin. "Many times in situations like this, leaders, elected officials and the media try to portray things we don't know. We were, I think, bending over backwards to be sure we were reporting a risk only if we knew it, whereas others, I feel rather strongly, were flipping it the other way."
Asked for an example, Revkin cites the Daily News. "Some of the headlines were unnecessarily alarmist and not supported by the facts."
Gonzalez has his own assessment of the competition's coverage. "The Times was and has continued to be total apologists for the EPA on just about everything."
Somewhere in the middle lurked some great, unwritten stories. Yes, as the Times repeatedly reported, air quality in lower Manhattan met federal health and environmental standards. In reality, however, those standards had no track record; they had been hastily cobbled together after 9/11 by scientists estimating the levels of risk. That whole process cried out for detailed coverage.
Yes, Gonzalez had a lot of frightening numbers from indoor and outdoor air measurements, and made the most of the conflicts between that data and official statements. But for people deciding whether to return or stay away, the numbers meant little without more explanation.
In the end, readers must have wondered if the two newspapers were covering the same event.
The NRDC's Eric Goldstein thinks most of the media were slow to ask hard questions. "The early pronouncements by the EPA administrator [that the air was safe] determined much of the way the media thought about this issue for months," he says.
He also believes the media and government officials underestimated how sophisticated the public can be. "Most Americans can accept some uncertainty on complex health issues," says Goldstein. "But they really get distressed when they sense government agencies aren't leveling with them or are trying to manage the news."
Many came to suspect that the official line of touting the good news was rooted in a desire by government and media bosses to get life, and the city's battered economy, back to normal. The EPA's Mears says: "The goal was to get the city back to normal, but it was never at the expense of the health of the people of New York. I never heard any conversation 'We have to reopen downtown; the hell with the [monitoring] information.' If our monitors had shown anything of concern, we surely would not have pushed for a reopened Manhattan."
Did the hometown media share that same craving? Newsday's Laurie Garrett thinks they might have.
"Every media outlet in town took a huge hit financially," she says. "It's hard for any news organization that's based on advertising revenues to resist a certain level of boosterism for the community that's the base of their advertising. Did that directly affect editorial policy at Newsday? I didn't see it happen, and I never had anybody say to me they were thinking that way."
Another, subtler, force might also have been at work: reporters' own hunger for life pre-9/11.
"For many of us living in New York, there was a psychological effect. Either we became very fearful, or we became New York-proud, defiant and angry," says Garrett. "I think it would be naïve in the extreme to think that our reporting would have been unaffected by that experience."
Garrett sees another problem in the media's coverage: The good guy/bad guy paradigm didn't fit. "The longer you follow the World Trade Center [health] story, you realize you can't point to the EPA and say these guys were terrible and negligent. It doesn't play out in that obvious fashion," she says. "You can't point to the activists and say, 'You guys are taking advantage of this catastrophe.'... Everybody is equally misfocused.
"We just aren't good in the media where there's no clear enemy but rather just a disturbing finding. Uncertainty is something reporters don't like to deal with."
In mid-January 2002, the out-of-town media jumped on the story. What had been largely a local issue now moved to the national stage, as reporters from St. Louis and Los Angeles detailed the fears and doubts afflicting many residents of lower Manhattan and highlighted the conflicting assessments of environmental risks. Some in New York welcomed the newcomers' arrival. But it also fed suspicions that the hometown media had taken a walk on the story.
"It was really people from out of town who were doing the best stories," says Marilena Christodoulou, then-president of the Stuyvesant High School Parents' Association, which at the time was locked in a bitter battle with the city's Board of Education over cleanup at the prestigious school near the World Trade Center. The school reopened a month after 9/11. "That gives you the impression that somehow there had been pressure put on the editors of the New York newspapers to keep it quiet--some misplaced patriotic interests or something."
The Los Angeles Times' Josh Getlin wrote of New Yorkers' brewing distrust of official claims on air quality, especially as attention turned to indoor pollution levels in homes and schools.
With a headline that screamed tabloid (except for its length), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch told Sunday readers: "NY Officials Underestimate Danger; 1 in 10 people exposed could be at risk of death, researchers say; Health authorities still insist that nearby homes, offices are safe; Hidden dangers lurk in the dust."
Andrew Schneider's 2,800-word January 13 article noted that government teams were using 20-year-old testing methods to assess asbestos levels. Private testing performed for labor unions, tenant groups, contractors and others used more sophisticated equipment and found dangerously high levels of asbestos inside buildings yet to be decontaminated, he wrote. Schneider quoted one of the EPA's own about the implications. "For every asbestos fiber EPA detected, the new methods used by the outside experts found nine," said Cate Jenkins, a senior EPA chemist in Washington, who became something of a media celebrity for her outspokenness. "This is too important a difference to be ignored if you really care about the health of the public."
Schneider contrasted the EPA's performance in lower Manhattan to its actions in Libby, Montana, where asbestos contamination led the EPA to declare the town a Superfund site in 2002 and institute extensive decontamination efforts to rid homes and the community of the fibers. In New York, the EPA wanted no part of indoor testing or cleanups--for the moment, at least.
About three weeks later, Schneider reported that some dust from the trade center was "as caustic as liquid drain cleaner." The alkaline dust burns moist tissue such as throats, eyes and nasal passages, and could explain the rash of respiratory problems afflicting New Yorkers, he wrote. Early warnings from the U.S. Geological Survey about the dust's toxicity had been ignored by other federal agencies, Schneider reported.
As they had with Gonzalez's column, EPA officials criticized Schneider's stories, saying he misrepresented the data and sensationalized the health implications. "I was disturbed and frustrated," says spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow, who complained to Schneider's editors.
On February 8, the New York Times' Kirk Johnson also addressed at length the uncertainty plaguing lower Manhattan, profiling 5-year-old Phoebe Kaufman and her parents, who worried about returning home amid conflicting reports on health risks. "There's no one to turn to" for information, said Phoebe's mother, Elizabeth Berger.
"This being New York, the diversity of conclusions is boundless," wrote Johnson. "Some people see downtown as a toxic nightmare, a kind of Manhattan Love Canal that has permanently poisoned the area's buildings and apartments with asbestos or chemicals. Others believe the risks are overblown or nonexistent."
Johnson described the "war of data and interpretation," with residents caught in the backwash of conflicting claims about air quality and safety. Pronouncements of air safety have not been disproved by the more than 10,000 samples gathered by the EPA, he wrote, but added that some residents and physicians distrust those findings. "[N]o answer seems certain, scientifically airtight, or obvious."
In early May, amid growing political and public pressure, the EPA reversed itself and announced it would lead the effort to test and clean an estimated 30,000 apartments in lower Manhattan. The EPA's Bellow explained the about-face: "It was certainly not a political decision. It was a decision based on a combination of looking at the science and the public need, and need includes people's concerns."
The day after the EPA's announcement, a Wall Street Journal story proclaimed "Buck-Passing Delayed EPA in 9/11 Cleanup." Reporter Jim Carlton's account began: "What took the Environmental Protection Agency eight months to assume responsibility for potential asbestos problems in homes in lower Manhattan...?" Carlton described how federal officials handed over responsibility to the city, which in turn delegated testing and cleanup to building owners and residents. He also provided new details about discrepancies in test results when electron microscopes were used to analyze dust versus the older method recommended by city health officials.
Over the next several months, preliminary research results began to document (but not explain) illnesses afflicting not only rescue workers but others outside Ground Zero. Studies found elevated rates of physical and emotional symptoms among faculty and staff at Stuyvesant High School, for example. Dozens of other inquiries are under way, and long-term health monitoring programs are being organized.
In late August, Newsday's Garrett raised a new question about those potentially at risk. Satellite photos taken on 9/11 by NASA showed a plume of dust engulfing Brooklyn. Garrett wrote that despite this, federal attention has focused only on lower Manhattan. Brooklyn's 2.4 million residents could also be in danger, she noted.
By the time the one-year anniversary stories began appearing last fall, the "toxic legacy" of the World Trade Center disaster was a prominent theme. The L.A. Times' Maggie Farley wrote that a "toxic cocktail containing many times the legal maximum levels of cancer-causing agents lingers everywhere." Newsweek observed that "the health impact on workers at the site and on lower Manhattan residents remains largely unknown."
The New York Times wrote about the impending publication of two medical studies documenting cases of "respiratory disability" among New York City firefighters in a September 10 story. The article described the potential forced early retirements of as many as 500 firefighters who had been exposed to dense clouds of dust, smoke and fumes at the World Trade Center.
In an article published in The American Prospect in late October, Laurie Garrett explored a theme that has been largely ignored by other media. "Health and environmental activists have focused their fears on the enemies they know," Garrett wrote, "asbestos and PCBs." Early results from the EPA's indoor testing show only 1 percent of the samples exceeded federal limits for regulated pollutants, she wrote.
But what if real threats lie in contamination by other enemies--chemicals and particulates for which there are no standards? "The most immediate and inescapable lesson...is that the regulatory framework in which environmental problems are addressed in the United States is probably too narrowly conceived to be useful in the face of events of the scale and complexity of the 9-11 disaster," Garrett wrote.
The same can be said of the journalistic framework. On some issues, no amount of interviews or digging will produce a conclusion. Is the uncertainty any less newsworthy than facts? Absolutely not--but only if readers know that the reporter has done the requisite research and still has come up empty.
Environmental officials got into trouble in the aftermath of 9/11 by providing assurances that later rang hollow in the public's ear. The media's credibility also was jeopardized because what people were reading bore little resemblance to what they were seeing with their own eyes. Here was a case where the public would far rather accept uncertainty than palliatives.
Ask the reporters who have followed the health issue for their predictions on how the story will end, and the responses are as diverse as the coverage.
"I think it's going to fade away," predicts the Times' Andrew Revkin.
Andrew Schneider disagrees. "This is a story that has to be followed." If the post-9/11 health debate teaches us anything, Schneider says, it is that "things have changed. The regulations, unfortunately, have not."
Who will be proven right?
Says Garrett: "We won't know the answer for a couple of decades."
9/11 air assurances disputed -- A draft report says EPA erred in saying
breathing at Ground Zero was safe,
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's pollution tests in the smoke-filled days following the World Trade Center collapse did not support the agency's pronouncements that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe, an independent federal investigation has found.
Further, the EPA reached its conclusion using a cancer risk level 100 times greater than what it traditionally deems "acceptable" for public exposure to toxic air contaminants, according to the EPA's Office of Inspector General.
The "preliminary conclusions," contained in an internal OIG document obtained by The Bee reinforce the views of many doctors and public health advocates involved in the medical evaluations of thousands of firefighters, volunteers, demolition workers and immigrant laborers who toiled in the thick of the dust, smoke and fumes.
"To say that it's safe, which suggests no risk -- we just knew that was wrong," said Jonathan Bennett, spokesman for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a labor union advocacy group, which had doctors in a roving van seeing cleanup workers.
"The proof of this was in what you saw in the people in the van and in people being seen to this day at the Mount Sinai Medical Center," Bennett said.
More than half the Ground Zero workers screened by health experts nearly a year after the attacks continued to suffer from lung, ear, nose and throat problems, according to a study released in January by Mount Sinai, in New York.
The federally funded screening program so far has evaluated more than 3,500 of the estimated 40,000 workers directly involved in the rescue, recovery and cleanup.
EPA officials declined comment Friday, noting that the inspector general's investigation is still under way.
"It is inappropriate for the EPA to be commenting on a document that is not final and that is being done independently," said Lisa Harrison, the agency's press secretary.
The preliminary findings by the EPA's Office of Inspector General are the latest in a series of criticisms that doctors, scientists and politicians have leveled against the EPA over its response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the twin towers.
The EPA's ombudsman at the time, Robert Martin, said in testimony last year before a Senate subcommittee that the EPA "has provided erroneous information to the public" and has "not used the best available technology to measure asbestos levels."
Martin later resigned in protest, saying EPA Administrator Christie Whitman moved to silence him. Whitman denies the charge.
A U.S. Geological Survey team found shortly after the attacks that some dust from the site was as caustic as drain cleaner because of the high concentration of pulverized cement, an alkaline substance. The team's conclusion, revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, had been sent to the EPA and other government agencies, but none made the finding public.
And, in February last year, scientists at the University of California, Davis, reported that dust and fumes from the smoldering rubble exposed lower Manhattan residents to some of the highest levels of air pollution ever recorded.
A study published last fall in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 332, or 3.3 percent, of the 9,914 New York City firefighters on the scene in the week after Sept. 11 developed "World Trade Center cough," a severe and persistent hacking.
"Within 24 hours after exposure, all 332 firefighters with World Trade Center cough reported having a productive cough; the sputum was usually black to grayish and infiltrated with 'pebbles or particles,' " the article states.
Dr. Ghulam Saydain, a pulmonologist at Nassau University Medical Center on Long Island, said some of the more than 600 patients -- mainly firefighters and police -- seen at the center's Ground Zero clinic developed "significant" respiratory disease.
"Many of them are getting better, and some of them, even after -- it's been more than 1 1/2 years now -- still have symptoms," Saydain said.
Thomas Cahill, a physicist and international authority on air pollution who led the UCD study, said his laboratory analyses of air samples showed that the towers' collapse spewed enormous amounts of potentially lethal, extremely tiny particles of crushed and incinerated computers, glass, furniture and other building debris unrecognized by the EPA's air monitoring.
"The EPA made a series of rather ordinary measurements and made pronouncements that were not supported by the facts," Cahill said last week upon learning of the OIG report.
The OIG has been investigating the EPA's handling of the World Trade Center fallout for more than a year, a spokeswoman said.
Though connected to the EPA, the agency has no authority over the inspection teams. The OIG acts as a public watchdog, investigating allegations of agency fraud, abuse and negligence. It reports to Congress.
The document obtained by The Bee is an internal OIG "status report" on the World Trade Center investigation. The report summarizes investigators' "preliminary conclusions" to date, based on interviews and document reviews, and outlines work in progress.
An OIG spokeswoman confirmed the report is accurate as of its date -- Jan. 27 -- but cautioned that the findings cited could change before publication, which is expected in mid-May.
"The information on there is not solid because our work is not concluded yet," said Eileen McMahon, an OIG spokeswoman.
A chief objective of the investigation is to determine whether air pollution monitoring data from the collapse site and in the surrounding New York financial district support what EPA told the public about the health risks.
Whitman, the agency administrator, made repeated assurances in the first few weeks after Sept. 11 that the air around the wreckage largely was safe to breathe.
"Given the scope of the tragedy ... I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that the air is safe to breathe, and their water is safe to drink," Whitman announced one week after the terrorist strikes.
In the January status report to Office of Inspector General managers, a team of six investigators said that it had concluded Whitman's declarations were premature.
"EPA did not have sufficient data to declare the ambient (outside) air 'safe to breathe' when it did," the report states.
The report cites several reasons:
* The EPA had data on only four of 14 pollutants that scientists believe the public potentially was exposed to immediately after the collapse of the twin towers.
* The criterion the EPA used to conclude asbestos levels were safe is not health-based. Rather, it is a crude standard applied to schools that have undergone asbestos removal, to make sure contractors made no major mistakes.
* The EPA's pronouncements did not address short-term health impacts.
* The agency's air quality standards are not applicable to this kind of pollution event: enormous clouds of finely pulverized glass, concrete and gypsum and a superheated pile of rubble that spewed ultrafine particles and poisons into the air for weeks.
"Health standards do not exist for (the) cumulative impact of exposure to several pollutants at once or the synergistic impact of air toxins unknown and little studied," the report states.
Also, the inspection team said it learned that the EPA applied a dramatically higher level of "acceptable risk" in making its pronouncements.
"EPA's conclusion that the air was safe is based on a one in 10,000 risk that someone will develop cancer from exposure to the WTC (World Trade Center) pollutants, and this was only for a limited set of POCs (pollutants of concern)," the report states.
For exposure to air toxins, the EPA traditionally has defined the acceptable cancer odds as a one in 1 million, for the general public. Its regulation of occupational exposures are based on risk levels no greater than 1 in 100,000.
The OIG also is focused on the role the White House played in drafting the EPA's press releases on the fallout of the World Trade Center collapse.
A former EPA chief of staff "acknowledged that the content of the WTC press releases was heavily influenced by (President Bush's) Council on Environmental Quality," the OIG report states.
"Selected e-mails indicate CEQ dictated (to the EPA public information office) the content of early press releases -- 100 percent of what CEQ added was added; 100 percent of what CEQ deleted was deleted," the report states.
The report does not say whether the EPA objected to the changes. Spokeswomen for the council and the EPA said it is not unusual for the White House to be involved in the drafting of public statements, especially on high-profile issues.
While the EPA declined comment on the ongoing investigation, Whitman has strongly defended the agency against other critics of its response to the New York City disaster.
She has pointed out that the EPA began monitoring the air in lower Manhattan within hours of the collapse and that many EPA officials provided scientific, engineering, public health and management expertise.
One scientist who was on the scene of the disaster said it is difficult to criticize the agency's decisions given the enormity of the job responding to the chaos.
"I don't think I would have done any better or any worse," said Paul Lioy, an environmental health scientist affiliated with Rutgers University and the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.
"We were just going from one place to another, one moment to another, trying to gather your wits in an event that shook the nation," Lioy said.
"This was a horrible learning experience."
Relatives' Lawyers Ask Court to Rule Sept. 11 Fund Unfair,
awyers representing the relatives of 10 World Trade
Center victims asked a federal court yesterday to rule that the fund created to compensate
families was unfair, arbitrary and tilted against those with high incomes, threatening to
shortchange surviving families by hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
After an all-day session of impassioned arguments by the families' lawyers, followed by rebuttal from a senior official with the Department of Justice, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court for the Southern District said he needed more time to weigh the evidence. But he promised to rule by early May.
And, if the instant analysis from lawyers who filled the courtroom in Lower Manhattan was any indication, then it seemed unlikely that the judge would grant the families' request to redo the formulas created by the fund's special master, Kenneth R. Feinberg.
Though Mr. Feinberg was not there he was well represented, with Robert McCallum Jr., acting associate attorney general, making the arguments before Judge Hellerstein, and senior staff members in the audience. In fact, in an indication of the importance of the case to the government, Mr. McCallum and his associates were introduced by James B. Comey, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
All parties, including Judge Hellerstein, had high praise for Mr. Feinberg, saying that he had undertaken a thankless and arduous task of trying to shepherd a federal program without precedent that is expected to cost taxpayers $4 billion to $5 billion. To date, the awards have totaled $528 million, or an average of $1.45 million per family.
But with that praise came no shortage of criticisms of the rules, administration and application of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund.
In all, three lawyers took turns making arguments on behalf of the families of 10 victims, all of whom worked at Cantor Fitzgerald: John F. Cambria, managing partner of the New York office of Salans; Marc S. Moller, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler; and Jonathan Reiter, a partner at Broder & Reiter.
Mr. Cambria, first to file a lawsuit against the fund, on Jan. 25, was the first to speak yesterday. And in a presentation that lasted more than 1 1/2 hours, he dwelled on how the fund's rules discriminated against unmarried victims and imposed an illegal cap on high-income families.
Mr. Moller made the strongest impression on the judge by talking about how the process was not subject to judicial review, and how there was too much ambiguity and subjectivity. He also framed the debate in broader brush strokes, saying that the case was also about the government having too power. "They were given the license to do right," he said, "not the power to do wrong."
Mr. Reiter was the most animated of his peers, talking about how a fear of giving away too much federal money was the major reason the government had imposed a cap. But when he tried to cite his client's case as an example, Judge Hellerstein cut him short, saying that the court did not want hear about specific cases, but rather matters of law.
In presenting the government's response, Mr. McCallum started by offering condolences to the relatives of the 2,800 victims who died at the World Trade Center, who would be covered by a class that would be created by the lawsuit. Then he argued that the fund was supposed to represent an option to litigation for families, not a replacement of the tort system.
Instead, Mr. McCallum said, the fund was designed to offer a "sustainable, realistic and reasonable foundation" upon which damaged and distraught families could begin to rebuild their lives. And it was designed to do so immediately, with tax-free government money that was guaranteed, and without the risks or costs of conventional litigation.
The hearing ended with many lawyers in the audience sensing that the judge, based on his comments and questions, would side with the government. Still, the families secured one victory when the judge ruled that the government had to share a spreadsheet from January 2002 that offered for the first time examples of possible awards for high-income victims' beneficiaries.
On the chart, it showed that a 25-year-old married person with no dependent children, making $1 million a year, would be entitled to an award of $24.5 million, before deductions like life insurance or pensions.
But the highest actual award to date has been only $5.7 million.
Deny 9/11 fund bias, By Robert Gearty, NY Daily News, Tuesday, April 15th, 2003
Government lawyers denied yesterday that the fund set up to compensate the families of
9/11 attack victims is shortchanging rich families.
They were responding to a potentially explosive lawsuit challenging the way the taxpayer-funded Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund's special master Ken Feinberg calculates how much each family gets.
That suit was filed in January by survivors of 10 former employees of the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald who earned salaries as high as $1 million. They want families of higher-paid victims to get awards commensurate with their loved ones' incomes.
Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum said Feinberg had a lot of room to determine award amounts, but had never meant to make them proportional.
"Those who earn more will get more," McCallum said. "The question is how much more."
The suit asks Manhattan Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, in charge of the voluminous Sept. 11 litigation, to intercede.
"What we need out of this is a declaratory judgment that says that need may not be used to limit an award," argued plaintiff attorney Marc Moller.
He accused Feinberg of putting a $3 million cap on awards.
"We just want the system to work equally and fairly," he said after the legal arguments.
The fund was set up to compensate the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Claimants have until Dec. 21 to apply but give up their right to sue if they do.
McCallum said 1,400 claims have been filed with the fund.
No cap on awards
He said Feinberg does not have a cap. One injured claimant has received a $6.7 million award. The average award has been about $1.85 million.
Hellerstein indicated he was reluctant to tamper with the system and would decide the matter by next month.
"While we debate the finer points of the law, we have to be careful not to forget that lives have been torn in a way that will not be repaired," he said.
HIP's mega-deal
for downtown, By Eric Herman, NY Daily News, Saturday,
April 12th, 2003
Brokers scrambled yesterday to complete Lower Manhattan's biggest office deal since the
World Trade Center attacks, as the Health Insurance Plan of New York inched closer to
leasing 500,000 square feet at 55 Water Street.
"We're expecting it to happen today," said Harry Bridgwood, executive vice president of New Water Street Corp., which owns the building.
The HIP deal could provide a needed boost for Lower Manhattan, bringing an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 new workers to the area. Most of HIP's workforce now works at 7 W. 34th St., at Fifth Avenue.
Earlier this year, insurer AIG renewed a lease for 540,000 square feet at 80 Pine Street.
The Water Street building consists of two connected structures - a 54-story building and a 14-story building. Owned by a subsidiary of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, 55 Water lost a major tenant last year when J.P. Morgan Chase vacated about a million square feet.
Since then, though, the building has bucked the trend of rising vacancies by signing two other insurance tenants - Chubb and Liberty Mutual, which leased over 100,000 square feet combined. The Teachers' Retirement System of New York City just signed a deal at 55 Water for about 150,000 square feet.
In all of Manhattan, the commercial office market remains weak, with rising vacancies and falling rents.
The size of the HIP deal - the equivalent of eight and a half football fields - harkens back to the red-hot leasing market of the late 1990s and 2000. Back then, tenants launched bidding wars for large blocks of space.
But since January 2002, only two other tenants have signed leases for 500,000 square feet or more in Manhattan.
HIP will take over the entire 14-story structure and part of the larger building, according to an executive close to the deal. The insurer will pay rent starting just above $30 per square foot. HIP personnel did not return calls seeking comment.
Brokers from Insignia/ESG and CB Richard Ellis represent the owners of 55 Water, while the firm GVA Williams represents HIP.
PA's sued
over WTC cop brawl,
A city engineer who says Port Authority cops beat him up in a Ground Zero altercation sued
the bistate agency for $20 million yesterday.
Michael Kenny, 40, of West Nyack, Rockland County, alleges cops broke his collarbone last year when he came to the assistance of a construction worker who tried to stop the cops from entering the site without safety gear.
Kenny was a project construction manager for the city Design and Construction Department, which oversaw the vast cleanup effort after the World Trade Center was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack.
The incident took place April 13, 2002 — the last night two powerful beams of light shone in a tribute to the twin towers. After the scuffle, Kenny was charged with resisting arrest. The case is scheduled to go on trial in Manhattan Criminal Court on April 22.
No pigeonholing
protesters, By Alice McQuillan and Melissa Grace, NY
Daily News, Friday, April 11th, 2003
Under a barrage of criticism, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday that cops
will stop quizzing arrested demonstrators about their political affiliations.
"We determined that was not that necessary," Kelly said of the policy, which was instituted two months ago during anti-war protests. "So we directed the form no longer be used."
Detectives from the NYPD's intelligence division had used a form to record where the demonstrators attended school, what membership they had in any organizations and their involvement in past protests.
Kelly said at a news conference yesterday that he and the head of the NYPD's intelligence division, David Cohen, were unaware of the questionnaire until early this week.
The commissioner said NYPD attorneys did not believe the form presented constitutional problems and that the policy was instituted in a "good-faith effort to help us determine what resources we needed to police demonstrations."
In the Manhattan offices of the New York Civil Liberties Union yesterday, lawyers and activists said the questionnaire - the Demonstration Debriefing Form - violated the protesters' First Amendment rights. The activists demanded proof that the survey answers were destroyed, that the origins of the program be investigated and that those responsible for creating it be disciplined.
"The Police Department has to find out who is responsible," said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. "It's fundamentally incompatible with democratic rights."
Chris Dunn, NYCLU associate legal director, said, "While Commissioner Kelly may have asserted he knew nothing about it, this did not come from someone at the bottom of the Police Department." Kelly said the NYPD was destroying an internal database containing the information. Officials said there were no plans to discipline those who came up with the forms.
"I was happy to give my name and address," said Brendan Knowlton, a 26-year-old upper West Side man charged with disorderly conduct after a Feb. 15 demonstration. "I was not comfortable with the other questions."
Rage over
memorial jury, By Maggie Haberman and Greg Gittrich, NY Daily News, Friday,
April 11th, 2003
Families of Sept. 11 victims fumed yesterday over the make-up of
the jury appointed to select the permanent Ground Zero memorial, saying many more victims'
loved ones should have been selected.
The 13-member jury boasts several notable names, including Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
But only one relative of the 2,792 people killed at the World Trade Center - Paula Grant Berry, whose husband died in the south tower - was chosen to sit on the panel.
"It's a disgrace," said Lee Ielpi, a member of a coalition of Sept.11 family groups, which has no one on the jury.
"There's nobody from the Police Department. Nobody from Cantor Fitzgerald [the firm that lost 658 workers]. There's no one from the Fire Department," said Ielpi, whose son, Jonathan, died in the attacks. "There are people on it who seem to have political connections."
Relatives of those killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing also were denied a seat. "I'm livid," said Michael Macko, who lost his father in the bombing.
However, Rick Bell, of the American Institute of Architects' New York chapter, defended the jury named by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.
"There's no weak link," Bell said, averring that the panel will resist political pressures.
The LMDC board also decided yesterday to create a single memorial that recognizes all the dead equally - without a special tribute to emergency workers.
A group of firefighters stood in the back of the board meeting as a silent protest and walked out after the unanimous vote.
Final design
Guidelines for the memorial competition will be announced April 28. Anyone 18 or older will be allowed to submit proposals. The jury will select a final design by November.
Along with Lin and Berry, the jury includes architects Enrique Norten and Michael Van Valkenburgh, as well as Lowery Stokes Sims, executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Vartan Gregorian, former president of the New York Public Library.
Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris will represent Mayor Bloomberg on the jury, and Michael McKeon, Gov. Pataki's former communications director, will represent the governor. Several victims' families were not upset by the selection of McKeon, with whom many grew close after Sept. 11.
Philanthropist David Rockefeller, who led the development of the twin towers, will serve as an honorary member.
The other jurors are Susan Freedman, president of the Public Art Fund; Julie Menin, who founded a nonprofit to help those living and working downtown; Martin Puryear, a renowned artist; Nancy Rosen, a former adviser to the New York State Arts Council, and James Young, chairman of the Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Interim LMDC President Kevin Rampe said the jurors' political contributions were "irrelevant." Three gave money to Pataki's reelection last year, with Menin donating the most, $11,000.
U.S. Plan for Wall St. Firms Drops Provision for a Move, By Charles V. Bagli, NY Times, 4/10/3
ederal regulators have recommended that companies
critical to the nation's financial system should try to resume operations within hours of
a disaster or terrorist attack. The regulators did not require that Wall Street firms move
their operations out of Manhattan, as many executives and city officials had feared.
A white paper issued jointly Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve said financial firms involved in processing market transactions should establish separate backup operations to help prevent wide-scale disruption of financial markets.
Tuesday's report, and an earlier version, were issued for the first time after Sept. 11, when the terror attack on the World Trade Center disrupted financial transactions for days.
Industry executives and city officials said yesterday that they were heartened that the federal agencies did not think it necessary that backup operations be a minimum distance from main offices. An earlier version suggested that backup sites be as much as 300 miles away. City officials had feared that such a requirement would encourage the flight of financial jobs from New York.
"It seemed to me to be a much better result for New York City than what they
started with," said Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff. "The reality is that
securities firms like
Donald Kittell, executive vice president of the Securities Industry Association, said some Wall Street companies had resisted efforts by regulators to establish distance requirements for satellite offices.
"You had firms that had just invested millions of dollars in backup sites that were within 300 miles of New York," Mr. Kittell said. "They were afraid that there would be some heavy-handed requirement that they build it somewhere else."
As a result of a sluggish economy and the terrorist attack, the financial industry in New York City has lost 37,100 jobs over the past 25 months. City officials did not want the regulators to cause another exodus.
The federal agencies did recommend, however, that backup sites be in locations that did
not use the same transportation network, telecommunications system or water as the main
offices. Mr. Doctoroff said it was unclear whether that would preclude the
The agencies are also expected to issue recommendations concerning trading operations by the New York Stock Exchange, the National Association of Securities Dealers and financial services firms. Executives said they wondered whether those companies would be required to build backup operations elsewhere. The stock exchange announced earlier this week that it had decided against building a parallel trading operation in Westchester.
"Everyone is waiting for a second white paper to drop," Mr. Kittell said.
Audit Finds State Agency Mishandled Some Post-9/11 Grants,
he New York State agency overseeing a program of federal
grants to businesses hurt by the World Trade Center attack paid too much or too little to
several companies, a federal audit has found.
The agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, made a small number of faulty payments, for relatively small sums, the audit found. But the agency paid millions of dollars to companies without getting details on how they had calculated their losses, a flaw that persisted despite a preliminary audit that flagged the problems.
Among the problems the audit found was the fact that the agency had failed to install appropriate administrative controls, including measures to ensure that businesses could not apply for and receive the same grant twice.
The deficiencies in Empire State Development's procedures were detailed in a federal report released two weeks ago by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department was designated by Congress to oversee $2.7 billion in Community Development Block Grants to businesses and individuals in Lower Manhattan as part of the $21 billion in federal aid pledged to New York City after the 9/11 attack.
Overall, the audit report said, Empire State Development has disbursed the disaster-relief money quickly and in accordance with federal rules, and its financial system "is capable of safeguarding the funds." And the inspector general acknowledged that Empire State Development was under pressure to quickly plan and put in place a system to aid companies that were in danger of going out of business.
But the report notes that the state agency failed to put into effect several changes it had promised to make after a preliminary audit report released last May, including a requirement for grant applicants to provide details on how their economic losses were determined.
Charles A. Gargano, the chairman of Empire State Development, said yesterday that the agency believed the results of the audit showed a successful grant program had been put in place.
"There are always some findings in any audit," Mr. Gargano said. "We'll do whatever we have to do to address the issues that were outlined for improvement." He noted that both its initial procedures and the revised May regulations were approved by the Housing and Urban Development staff, and that any company submitting false estimates of its losses was subject to prosecution for fraud.
The audit focused on two of the largest 9/11-related programs overseen by the agency: the $481 million World Trade Center Business Recovery Grant Program and a $155 million Small Firm Attraction and Retention Grant Program.
The Business Recovery and Small Firm Attraction programs are designed to compensate small companies — defined as those with fewer than 500 employees — that suffered physical damage, were shut or lost business after the attack on the trade center, or to attract companies to the area or keep them there.
By the middle of March, grants totaling $580 million had been approved under the two programs for more than 15,000 small companies. The audit raises significant questions about whether the money is going where it was intended, and makes clear that this is not the first time the questions have been raised.
Nearly a year ago, the inspector general warned Empire State Development that it should begin requiring companies to verify the losses they claimed after 9/11. As a result, the agency changed its application forms to include a request for details on losses.
But the audit found that more than half of the applications sampled — including many turned in after the new forms were in use — did not include details on how a company calculated its losses.
"As a result," the audit report said, "we cannot be assured that the Empire State Development Corporation is obtaining the details from applicants to support the amounts of their estimated economic losses."
The audit also found instances in which Empire State Development incorrectly calculated grants, most often resulting in an overpayment to companies. The inspector general estimated that in approving the first 10,000 grant applications, the agency made net overpayments of more than $1 million.
Fighting taxes on 9/11 aid, NY Daily News, Paul HB Shin, 4/7/3
What the government openly gives with one hand, it quietly takes away with the other.
That's the angry charge downtown merchants and elected officials are expected to lodge today as they urge the Internal Revenue Service to reverse a belated decision to collect taxes on 9/11 relief grants.
"The government gave the aid to help people recover, and now they're trying to take it back in taxes. It makes no sense," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who introduced legislation last week to make 9/11 recovery grants tax-exempt.
Maloney plans to unveil a report today showing the local economic impact from taxing those grants.
About $772 million in grants was awarded to downtown businesses, and an additional $281 million was given to people who lived in lower Manhattan.
But the IRS decided in November to collect taxes on all business grants and a large portion of residential grants - meaning the government will take back $200 million, according to the report.
"I used all that money to start my business all over again, and now business is terrible," said Olga Diaz, whose beauty salon was located in 3 World Trade Center.
Agency Lowers Estimate of Post-9/11 Aid to Small Businesses,
rompting the latest dispute over whether government
programs are meeting Lower Manhattan's needs since Sept. 11, 2001, New York State's
economic development agency has sharply cut its estimate of how much it will spend on a
major incentives program for small businesses to stay in the area or move there.