November 2001 News Stories

Juan Gonzalez ore than 130,000 gallons of oil from transformers and high-voltage lines — most of it containing low levels of hazardous PCBs — were lost at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 when two downtown Con Edison substations were destroyed.

In addition to the Con Ed release, confirmed by company spokesman Mike Clendenin, the Port Authority is unable to account for 50,000 of 70,000 gallons of diesel and fuel oil stored in belowground tanks at the Trade Center complex to power emergency generators.

As much as 180,000 gallons of flammable oil — roughly equivalent to 10 times the amount of jet fuel in the two airliners that crashed into the twin towers — may be feeding the fires that have been burning for more than two months at the site.

Con Ed and Port Authority officials say they don't know whether the contaminants seeped into the soil, burned or drained off into the Hudson River. Environmental Protection Agency officials confirmed they are searching for the oil and pumping it out when they find it.

A private environmental data firm hired by the city to report on known hazardous materials at the Trade Center warned in a letter to federal and state environmental officials this week that the oil "could be fueling the onsite fires."

A copy of the letter from Walter Hang, president of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Toxics Targeting Inc., was obtained by the Daily News.

"That's exactly what's burning," said a Fire Department source. "All that fuel, all those cars that were in parking lots down there, all kinds of stuff."

Information Not Released

On Monday, Carl Johnson, deputy commissioner for air and waste management for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, told an Assembly hearing on downtown air quality, "I don't believe that we saw anything that involved a large quantity of PCBs."

After the hearing, when informed by a reporter that both Con Ed and the Port Authority said they notified the DEC about a half-dozen incidents involving oil or natural gas releases, Johnson replied: "I'm not aware of that."

DEC officials have not released any information on Trade Center environmental contamination since Sept. 11.

According to Clendenin, Con Ed lost 30,000 gallons of dielectric fluid — essentially mineral oil — from several high-voltage lines when 7 World Trade Center collapsed. The building's fall late in the afternoon of Sept. 11 may have resulted from a raging fire fed by fuel from the storage tanks beneath the building, according to some familiar with the Trade Center complex.

In addition, 100,000 gallons of insulating oil containing PCBs spilled from large transformers and capacitors when the substations behind 7 WTC were destroyed.

"To the best of our knowledge, those transformer oils contained 1 to 10 parts per million of PCBs," Clendenin said — considerably below the state danger level of 50 parts per million.

Production of PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls — has been banned in the U.S. since 1977, when the federal government declared them dangerous to human health. But many PCBs are still found in old transformers, industrial equipment and fluorescent lighting fixtures.

Exposure to high levels of PCBs for brief periods can result in acnelike skin conditions in adults and neurobehavioral and immunological problems in children.

Long-term exposure can cause cancer, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry.

But even low levels of PCBs could signal environmental problems in the presence of an uncontrolled fire, say both Hang and environment officials.

"The incomplete combustion of PCBs could be a source" of dioxins, Hang wrote in his Nov. 25 letter, and that "could pose a grave threat to the health of those working on or near the site, as well as those living nearby."

EPA monitoring reports have shown levels of dioxin around the WTC site exceed safety levels for what the agency calls a "30-year exposure period." A handful of readings have been above safety levels for a one-year exposure — meaning constant exposure over a year could result in serious health problems.

EPA spokeswoman Mary Helen Cervantes said the agency expected to see increased dioxin levels at a major fire like the one at the Trade Center.

"We're definitely concerned about any possible toxic substances that are being released down there," she said.

So far, Con Ed's estimate of the low PCB content in its lost oil has not been verified by the DEC or any other independent agency.

In September 1998, the utility reported there were no PCBs in any of the oil released from a transformer fire at its Arthur Kill power station. Only later was it learned that the oil contained 306,000 parts per million of PCBs. Con Ed paid a $500,000 fine this year and signed a new consent decree with the state on environmental monitoring.

Ground Zero Tenants In Court Fight vs. Landlords

By HELEN PETERSON
Daily News Staff Writer

enants and landlords in residential buildings near Ground Zero are taking their disputes to court.

More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed in Housing Court — a number that could increase dramatically if owners and tenants don't find a way to settle their differences, said Jack Lester, a lawyer for tenants from eight downtown buildings.

He said his clients "are living inside a construction site, a police state and a war zone" and are entitled to rent reductions under the law.

Lester said they also are concerned about air quality and cleanup of hazardous materials. He said the 24-hour operation means noise and artificial light around the clock, as well as rodent infestation.

Landlords in many cases are willing to offer some type of rent abatement but argue they also are victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The landlord has mortgage payments, tax payments, operating expenses, regardless of whether tenants are paying rent," said lawyer Joseph Burden, who represents 88 Greenwich St.

He said owners expect to have a hard time renting apartments vacated by tenants since Sept. 11 and will likely have to reduce rents for new tenants.

He and Lester will be in court today in an effort to reach a settlement.

Tenants in the Greenwich St. building, two blocks from the Trade Center site, have been offered a 20% rent reduction if they stay. Those who break their lease forfeit their security deposit, Burden said. About 30 tenants are withholding rent, he said.

One 88 Greenwich St. tenant, Kate Webber-Pitlock, who moved to the building in May, hopes the case will be resolved. Despite the emotional trauma of living there, she intends to stay.

"It is very psychologically trying to walk by a mass grave site every day. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that there is mass construction," she said.

Richard Breton, an owner of 32 Pearl St., said he expects to file suit this week against a tenant three months behind in rent, and will send notices to eight others who are two months in arrears.

He said he is willing to give a 10% rent reduction and allow tenants with children under age 19 or with medical conditions to break their leases. But he added that he and other landlords won't commit "financial suicide" by letting all tenants leave without any penalties.

"We're trying to deal humanely and ethically with our tenants," Breton said. "We have to do it within the financial constraints of the buildings we operate."

More Ground Zero Air Studies Urged

By JOE WILLIAMS
Daily News Staff Writer

tate agencies should be doing more to determine whether there are any potential long-term health risks from the air around the World Trade Center site, Assembly leaders said yesterday.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) said his office has had a "significant influx" of complaints about skin rashes, sinusitis and aggravated asthma from people working and living in lower Manhattan. He renewed his call for one agency to oversee environmental issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Don't we have some concern about the impact on people now, as we ask them to walk around while we make public pronouncements that the air is safe?" Silver asked during a four-hour public hearing on air quality, held blocks from Ground Zero.

State health and environmental officials said they believe any illnesses caused by the air will be short-lived — despite occasional high readings of toxins and dust near the site.

"There is every reason to believe that what these people are experiencing is real," said Ronald Tramontano, director of the state Health Department's Center for Environmental Health.

He and other officials said some health problems may go away once the fires stop burning at the site and because the smoke may be the biggest cause of irritation.

"You can be exposed to horrendous levels of dust and cough them up over time," Tramontano said. "What we're saying is that based on everything we know, there is no concern for continuous exposure at this time."

But Silver and Assemblymen Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester) and Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan) said that not enough has been done to determine the possible long-term impact of any environmental damage.

"If things that we are monitoring as pollutants are serious enough that our bodies are reacting to them, that ought to tell us something," said Gottfried, chairman of the Assembly Health Committee.

Legal Protection Sought

Brodsky also asked state officials whether workers at Ground Zero will be protected legally in the future to the same extent that rescue workers at the Pentagon are.

Brodsky, chairman of the Environmental Conservation Committee, said federal officials had encouraged many workers at the Pentagon to file a form called "First Report of Injury" after the Sept. 11 attack.

The forms are filed by workers who may experience a hazard on the job in which the injury does not surface for several years. It is used as an official record for future workers' compensation claims.

"Have any of your departments made such a report for the workers at the Trade Center site?" Brodsky asked.

The answer was no.

Landlords Sue Rent-Striking Tenants
By Tom Perrotta

Landlords in lower Manhattan are suing tenants who have refused to pay rent since the attacks on the World Trade Center wreaked havoc on their neighborhood.

More than a dozen suits seeking eviction and overdue rent have been filed in New York City Housing Court over the last few weeks, mostly against tenants who remain in their apartments but have called rent strikes or withheld payment. A few suits involve tenants who have simply left their homes behind.

On Monday, an attorney for some of these tenants filed eight countersuits against the owners of 88 Greenwich St., 32 Pearl St. and 100 John St. The suits allege that the apartments are uninhabitable and cite numerous lingering hazards related to the Sept. 11 attack, such as rodent infestation, asbestos and other toxic substances, dirt and dust, noise, and loss of heat and hot water. The suits seek a jury award on the warranty of habitability claims as well as court costs and legal fees.

"There's going to be hundreds of these over the next several weeks," said Jack L. Lester, who is representing tenants at 88 Greenwich, 100 John St., 32 Pearl St., 50 Battery Park Place, Gateway Plaza and 75 Nassau St. He said the parties are scheduled to appear in court Nov. 29 for one of the countersuits against 88 Greenwich LLC.

Tension between landlords and tenants has been building since residents were evacuated from the area after the twin towers fell, engulfing block after block in debris and dust. Landlords have uniformly agreed not to charge residents for any time they were prevented from entering their apartments. Many buildings in and around Battery Park have offered reduced rents for the remainder of leases or subsequent leases, and some have allowed tenants to break leases without penalty or for the price of a month's rent.

To many tenants, though, the offers have not been good enough. Some have insisted on the option to break leases without penalty if they give 30 days' notice. Others want landlords to pay for more environmental tests as conflicting reports about air safety pile up. Some are seeking abatements of up to 50 percent, and many offer tales of apartments that have been hastily or improperly cleaned and repaired since the attacks (NYLJ Oct. 22).

Joseph Burden of Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman, who is representing 88 Greenwich LLC, the owner of 88 Greenwich St., said he had not yet seen the countersuit. He said his clients have authorized actions against 25 to 30 tenants, and so far he has filed about a dozen suits.

A fellow attorney at his firm, Martin T. Meltzer, is working with Mr. Burden on possible suits at 32 Park Row. According to court documents, Mr. Meltzer filed a suit against a tenant late last month on behalf of William & Pearl Partners LLC, the owner of 32 Pearl St. Mr. Meltzer said he has filed several suits for clients and has about 30 others pending.

"I think the landlord has been very reasonable in offering a 20 percent abatement," Mr. Burden said of 88 Greenwich LLC. The owner has also as offered to allow tenants out of their leases in exchange for losing their security deposit. "Landlords can't understand why tenants are going forward with this," he said of the strikes and suits. He said tenants could win suits based on warranty of habitability claims and still end up with lesser offers than they have now.

Litigation Surge

The prospect of post-attack housing litigation being filed in bulk has caught the attention of court officials. Ernest J. Cavallo, the deputy administrative judge for housing, said the Housing Court two weeks ago began distributing a 47-page booklet for non-lawyers that addresses questions related to the attacks, such as what to do if a tenant cannot be found or if a relative of a deceased tenant needs to get into an apartment to collect samples for DNA testing.

Fern Fisher-Brandveen, the administrative judge for civil courts citywide, said she was expecting a surge in this type of litigation, and not just in Manhattan. She said the cases would likely be more complicated than similar disputes not related to the attacks and would present novel legal issues.

Judge Fisher-Brandveen said a special housing part has been set up for people called up to military duty, but there are no plans as of yet to consolidate all World Trade Center cases related to housing under one judge. She said one of the court's present judges, rather than an additional one, will preside over the military part.

"We will make a special part if necessary," Judge Fisher-Brandveen said. "That could have positives and negatives for both sides. It could be overwhelming."

Mr. Lester and Mr. Burden both agree that the Housing Court most likely will group together suits by building, but Mr. Lester said he believes it would be best to consolidate all warranty of habitability suits related to the attacks.

"There are thousands of tenants affected by this and it's all the same issue," Mr. Lester said. Without a system in place to streamline the proceedings, he said, decisions could be inconsistent and eventually bog down the Appellate Term, First Department.

Mr. Burden disagreed. "I think consolidating all the cases downtown would be somewhat difficult because each building is unique," he said. Some, for example, are rent-stabilized; others have more damage than others. Also, he said, disputes could arise over which judge was selected to hear the cases.

Asked to assess the fate of most of these disputes, Daniel Finkelstein of Finkelstein Newman, a tenant lawyer and the author of Landlord and Tenant Practice in New York (West Group, 1997), said he believes most of them will be settled. But he also thinks sympathy for victims of the attacks may bring changes to landlord-tenant law.

"The law is going to evolve," he said. "Warranty of habitability is going to be affected and probably broadened a little bit."

More School Enviro Tests

By ALISON GENDAR, Daily News Staff Writer

t the urging of frightened parents, the Board of Education has agreed to perform more extensive environmental testing at six downtown schools than was done at Stuyvesant High School.


	Public School 234 students Leilei O'Connor (l.), Francesca Taylor and Meghan Grayce Byrnes — fourth-graders of teacher Miki Jensen — attend class in the former St. Bernard school on W. 13th St.

Parents of children who attend Public School 234 on Chambers St., worried about contaminants in the acrid smoke from the smoldering World Trade Center wreckage, demanded the Board of Ed expand its testing before they would send their children back to the school that has been shuttered since Sept. 11.

"We learned from Stuyvesant's mistakes," said Ahsan Farooqi, a parent of a PS 234 student. "The board says all the tests done at Stuyvesant came back clean, but students still got sick when they came back, with headaches and nosebleeds."

Bernard Orlan, the Board of Ed's director of environmental safety, agreed to test for a broader array of chemicals before reopening PS 234 and the other schools that have been closed since the attacks. They are PS 150, PS 89, Intermediate School 89, the High School for Economics and Finance and the High School for Leadership and Public Service.

"There will be additional tests done before the other schools reopen because we have learned more since Stuyvesant," Orlan said. The chemical hit list has not been completed.

But Orlan stressed that the extra tests were aimed at easing parents' fears, not because testing at Stuyvesant was insufficient.

"So far all tests taken at Stuyvesant since the building was cleaned and reopened have come back negative," he said.

Parents of students and staff at Stuyvesant, the first of the evacuated schools to reopen, were furious at what they called a double standard.

"Why should we have been the guinea pigs?" fumed one Stuyvesant teacher. "Everyone knew there was a ton of stuff burning at the towers. Why increase the tests so late in the game?"

Before Stuyvesant resumed classes on Oct. 9, after a $1 million cleanup, the building was tested, at a cost of about $5,000, for half-a-dozen broad types of contaminants in the air and in dust samples, including asbestos and highly toxic organic chemicals.

Testing at the school at Chambers and West Sts. has continued at a cost of about $30,000 a week for a slightly expanded list of dangerous chemicals including benzine, a colorless flammable liquid mixture of various hydrocarbons.

Safe Levels Shown

Board of Ed officials have said regular testing for asbestos, PCBs and other harmful materials consistently have shown safe levels at the school, though disease experts are probing the source of nosebleeds and headaches that some students and staff initially reported.

But the amount of testing that PS 234 parents are demanding could cost an extra $90,000 per school, and ongoing monitoring $40,000 a week per school, experts said.

A group of medical and environmental experts are meeting at the Board of Ed today to craft uniform guidelines for testing and reopening the six schools.

In the meantime, PS 234 parents hired their own environmental consultant, Environ International of Princeton, N.J., to make recommendations to the Board of Ed. Students are attending classes in the former St. Bernard school on W. 13th St., an arrangement that many parents are in no hurry to end.

Closure? A Buzzword Becomes a Quest

By SHAILA K. DEWAN

legal secretary who lives in Brooklyn returned to the site of the twin towers on Oct. 11 in search of it. A Bronx businessman designed an itinerary so his relatives, visiting from Nigeria for their daughter's funeral, could get it. The mayor has sought to give it to bereaved families in the form of urns filled with ashes. A woman whose husband's body was identified does not mention that she has it, because other widows do not.

Virtually everyone, it seems, is looking for closure.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the term has gone from a buzzword to a commonplace, used as frequently by families and firefighters as by politicians and newscasters.

When Mark Green patched things up with his opponent, Fernando Ferrer, after the Democratic mayoral runoff, he cited the need for it. So did an emergency medical technician from Queens who was asked why he was getting a 9-11 memorial tattoo on his arm. "I don't know," he shrugged. "Closure?"

Despite its ring of authority, closure, in the popular sense of the word, is generally not to be found in psychology textbooks. In self-help meetings, courtrooms and politics, it has become shorthand for which the longhand is unclear. And not only is it not a clinical term, mental health professionals say, it represents a flawed concept whose overuse could do more harm than good.

In a time of war, terrorist alerts, anthrax scares and plane crashes, grief specialists and counselors worry that the notion of closure, which implies that emotions conform to a preordained agenda, is premature. It is, they say, symptomatic of a society that believes in getting on with things at all costs. ("The city has to keep going forward," Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said the day that Flight 587 crashed.)

"It's associated with another phrase, which is a very strange one: `Put it behind us,' " said Dennis Klass, editor of the book "Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief" (Taylor & Francis, 1996) and a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St. Louis. "Maybe we put a contested election behind us. But we do not put death behind us. We do not put disaster — or call it trauma — behind us. We put either behind us at our own peril."

Even as the steppingstones that are supposed to lead to closure, from expedited death certificates to memorial services at ground zero, are carefully laid out for families to follow, some counselors are banning the concept altogether.

"We usually avoid that word because I don't think there really is a true closure," said Dr. Kerry J. Kelly, chief medical officer for the New York Fire Department. "The grieving continues, but in different ways."

Dr. Neal L. Cohen, the city's commissioner of health, said that fewer families than expected have taken the proffered, streamlined route to closure. (He called the term itself simplistic.) His office said just over 2,000 death certificates had been requested.

The rest of the families, it appears, are moving at their own pace. "I have one client that was given a little container of dirt from the site, and it was like, `Here, now go forth and be comforted,' " said Sandra Owens, a trauma and grief counselor who has worked with victims' families. "He was horrified. He was horrified."

The word closure implies an ending, Ms. Owens said, even as Americans are just beginning to adjust to a new reality. She sees the rush to closure as wishful thinking that things will return to normal. "Those who are looking so desperately for it, or who think they've found it, are just trying to anesthetize themselves to what's going on," she said.

Many grief experts see danger in denial. "We `closed' the Oklahoma City bombing by killing Timothy McVeigh and then acting as if the disaffection that McVeigh represented isn't there," Dr. Klass said. "When we put things behind us and don't learn from them — don't change our lives because now we know that — that's not healthy."

But the chimera of closure holds out some alluring promises: an end to the pain of grief and a return to normalcy or even prosperity. The sooner, of course, the better. For companies dealing with a traumatized work force, there are economic reasons to encourage moving on. "Closure is a euphemism for: `We've lost a hell of a lot of money, we can't lose any more, so if you value your job, get back on that computer screen,' " Ms. Owens said.

John R. Aiello, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on social and organizational psychology and has counseled employees at several companies since Sept. 11, agreed. "That's the bottom line," he said, cautioning, "I think it's shortsighted when companies go in that direction." Workers who fear losing their jobs may develop post-traumatic stress syndrome and other problems that impair productivity.

Closure is not a word with an easy definition. It means, well, you know, closure. Samuel J. Tenenbaum, a retired businessman and philanthropist in Columbia, S.C., helped lead an effort to raise enough money to buy a fire engine for New York, in return for a hose carriage that New York firefighters sent to Columbia when the city was devastated by fire after the Civil War. What, exactly, does he mean when he says the gesture will bring closure? "It brings closure to that era of conflict but also helps bring closure to this moment of contemporary disaster," Mr. Tenenbaum explained, adding, "It's a difficult concept to talk about."

Some date the widespread use of the term to the Oklahoma City bombing, others to the Monica Lewinsky debacle. From South Africa, with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the Deep South, with its long- delayed trials of Klansmen, communities have dealt with closure. But typically, justice, or at least legal resolution, has been a component. With the World Trade Center, that aspect has fallen away, at least for now.

"In my mind I'm thinking, going out to war, is that going to make everything all right?" said Minerva Mentor-Portillo, who buried her husband last month. With skepticism in her voice, she added, "Is that going to make my husband's death not in vain?"

For those closest to the tragedy, like Ms. Mentor-Portillo, closure means one thing: finding their loved ones' remains. In this new, upside- down world, that has come to be viewed as a blessing. And even counselors agree that if closure means confronting reality so it can begin to be assimilated, then it is all right.

For Kathleen Wik, whose husband worked for the Aon Corporation, the receipt of his body and his wedding ring has made his death something more real than a horrific event she watched on the news. But that does not mean her mourning is over. "Oh God, no. I think I've only just begun," she said. But there are few ways to put a name to her experience. "I got closure because I got his body. Is that the truest sense of the word? I don't know."

Hold the Mayo, and the Sandwich: Exchange Bans Deliveries

By EDWARD WYATT

n embattled Lower Manhattan, major corporations have fled, businesses have folded, and now, even lunch is under siege.

The New York Stock Exchange, arguably the largest downtown employer of people with incentives to eat at their desks, outlawed food deliveries to the floor of the exchange last month. Stock exchange traders, who previously waited patiently each day for delivery of their salami and Snapple, now must go outside themselves or send a clerk to pick up their food and bring it back, pausing to pass their sandwiches through an X-ray machine on the street behind the exchange as they return to the building.

This might seem to be an insignificant event, but the delicatessens, diners and sandwich shops of Lower Manhattan, many of them dependent almost exclusively on lunch revenue, had already been suffering from a loss of customers as a result of the World Trade Center disaster. Now the delivery ban has dealt what, for some, might be the final blow.

"Half of my lunch business went to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange," said Richard Weiner, the owner of Wolf's Delicatessen, in the basement of the former Equitable building at 120 Broadway.

Though the deli is barely more than a block from the exchange, business has now fallen by 50 percent, he said, adding, "You can't lose $3,000 a week in business when you're struggling to begin with and really make a go of it."

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times A deli deliveryman could only go so far before facing new security checks at the New York Stock Exchange. Deliveries have been banned, hurting the nearby lunch trade.

Mr. Weiner is not alone. For the owners of many restaurants and delis in the financial district, the traders on the floor — the foot soldiers on the front lines of capitalism — were their biggest customers. The proceeds from those daily rations sent the lunch suppliers' sons and daughters to college and paid for vacations from the 12-hour days of running a small business.

Few institutions dominate the financial and psychological health of their neighborhoods like the New York Stock Exchange does that of Lower Manhattan. When stock prices are up and traders are making money, the effects trickle down to the boot blacks and the cigar salesmen. When stocks are struggling and traders dour, fruit vendors and, most certainly, restaurant owners, suffer, too.

A spokeswoman for the exchange said that she could not comment on the exchange's lunch delivery policy because "it is a security issue." Many traders who work on the floor, asked about the matter as they returned from picking up their lunches last week, also declined to comment.

But a New York Stock Exchange official and an executive of a large trading firm, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, each confirmed details of the new policy. They said the change was made because of concerns that a delivery person could easily slip a bomb into a sandwich bag that could elude the X-ray machines and bomb-sniffing dogs that already surround the stock exchange building, which is considered by many law-enforcement officials as one of the main terrorist targets in Manhattan.

The trading firm official noted that with volume down on the stock exchange, most firms have no trouble finding clerks to send out to pick up lunch. But stock traders, perhaps more so than most people, are creatures of habit, and it was more convenient to be able to send a clerk out to the sidewalk in front of the building to pick up an order from a delivery person — as was allowed under the former rules — than it is to dispatch a clerk several blocks to a restaurant or deli.

And with a cafeteria and a formal dining room in the building, far more traders are now staying inside for lunch.

It is not just the stock traders' deliveries that have changed in the lunch landscape of Lower Manhattan, which has lost more than 100,000 workers since Sept. 11. Workers who remain downtown said they have only recently started to venture out at lunchtime.

Fred Aaron, a lawyer for an insurance company, said he regularly used to walk the six blocks from his office on Pine Street to J & R Music World on Park Row to browse among the compact discs at lunchtime, often stopping to eat a sandwich or, at least, pick one up to take back to his desk. Now, he said: "It's too depressing. If I go out, I stay closer to the office."

Jason Bilanin, who works at Chase Manhattan Plaza, said that before Sept. 11, he often strolled several blocks to the South Street Seaport at lunchtime to take in the fresh air and, along the way, get a bite to eat. On Tuesday, he was eating at Zeytuna, a restaurant on Maiden Lane, barely a block from his office.

"It was three weeks before I started going out at all," Mr. Bilanin said. "Now, I don't venture as far as I used to. I don't know when it will get back to normal."

Some upscale restaurants are finding that business has picked up, and they say they are looking forward to the holiday season. Corrado Goglia, a manager at Delmonico's, the landmark restaurant on Beaver Street, said that its lunch and dinner business was back to 75 percent of normal and bookings for December were nearly 90 percent full.

But restaurants that are more dependent on lunch — many of which do not serve dinner — are feeling a far tighter pinch.

"Like all of the restaurants down here, the stock exchange was really the backbone of our business," said Peter M. Semetis, the owner of Sale & Pepe, a restaurant and catering business at the intersection of Broadway and Exchange Place.

Mr. Semetis said his deliveries to the exchange have dropped from about 55 to 10 a day. "The traders make their money by watching the screens, watching the stocks on the Big Board," he said. "A lot of them are just not going to go out to pick something up."

Tighter security is affecting restaurants in other ways as well. In mid- August, Mr. Weiner moved Wolf's Delicatessen to the basement concourse of the Equitable building from its longtime location on Trinity Place at Edgar Street. Though the new site does not have frontage on the street, Mr. Weiner said he was encouraged by the chance to more than double the restaurant's seating capacity, to 200.

In addition, an exit from the Wall Street Station of the No. 4 and 5 subway lines emptied into the Equitable concourse in front of his door. With thousands of potential customers striding by each morning, at least a few were certain to stop for an egg sandwich and coffee, he said.

Since Sept. 11, however, heightened security at the building has left the subway entrance closed. Moreover, anyone who wants to visit the restaurant has to provide a photo ID and sign in to get into the building, arguably a disincentive for someone out for a quick bite for lunch.

Add to that the fact that phone service was out for weeks, certainly a drawback for a business heavily dependent on call-in orders.

"My wife and I borrowed a ton of money to move into this place," Mr. Weiner said.

The restaurant space had been empty for nearly 12 years, he said, and needed substantial renovation as well as new furniture.

Mr. Semetis, of Sale & Pepe, has similar woes. Express buses from Brooklyn and Queens used to stop directly outside his shop on Trinity Place. Now, they have been rerouted elsewhere, and his morning walk-in traffic has dropped by 80 percent.

"People are not going to walk out of their way for coffee and a muffin," Mr. Semetis said. In the meantime, he added, corporations as well as individuals are watching their spending, on catering as well as other expenses.

Both Mr. Semetis and Mr. Weiner are taking advantage of aid programs being offered to downtown businesses. Sale & Pepe was one of the recipients of an award from the grant, loan and wage subsidy program sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown Manhattan and Seedco, a community development organization. And Wolf's Delicatessen was chosen to receive free consulting services by Stern Rebuilds, a program organized by New York University's Stern School of Business.

Neither of them knows, however, if that help will be enough. "We've been down here forever," Mr. Weiner said. "For Wall Street to be without Wolf's would be a crying shame. But that's a real possibility."

Collateral Damage in Lower Manhattan

By TERRY PRISTIN

or many people trying to make a living in Lower Manhattan, the weeks since Sept. 11 have been devastating. Shops were closed or inaccessible, and so no money came in, putting business owners behind in their rent. Once these businesses did reopen, they discovered that their customer base had largely vanished.

As if that were not hardship enough, some business owners say, they have also had to contend with unsympathetic landlords and the threat of eviction.

As many as three dozen downtown business owners have complained to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that their landlords are trying to get rid of them, said Akira Arroyo, a lawyer at the bar association who refers commercial tenants to lawyers willing to represent them pro bono.

"We're getting a lot of these in now," Ms. Arroyo said. "I don't know what's motivating these landlords. You'd think that they would want to keep the tenants they have."

Many of these commercial tenants were suffering from the economic downturn even before the World Trade Center attack. Most did not have insurance that would have protected them from an interruption in their business, and they realize that the law is not on their side. They say they are simply asking landlords to be sensitive to their situation. Landlords say they have to pay their mortgages, taxes and other expenses and cannot afford to serve as a crutch for struggling businesses.

Richard Perry/The New York Times Yuriy Davidov, an Uzbek immigrant, has seen his shoe repair work drop to a fifth of what it was before Sept. 11.

"Nobody's coming to the landlord and saying, `Let's help you out,' " said Dan Forrester, an owner of Transworld Equities, which has seven buildings in Lower Manhattan.

Some landlords in Lower Manhattan are nonprofit organizations, which use their rent income to finance social programs. For example, the Collegiate Church, headquartered at 45 John Street, owns six commercial properties in Lower Manhattan, including the once-bustling subway arcade at 150 Fulton Street, a block from the World Trade Center, which is now practically deserted.

Yuriy Davidov operates a tiny shoe repair shop in the arcade. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, his revenue has dropped to as little as $40 a day from $200. "Normally, I work all day, and I cannot pick my head up," said Mr. Davidov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan. "Now, I'm all day reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes."

His neighbors have not fared any better. Most of the hangers in the dry cleaner next door are holding unclaimed garments left there before Sept. 11, and two of the other half- dozen arcade tenants, a framing store and a coffee shop, have folded.

Rubin Shin, who owns Alex's Barber Shop and pays $3,000 a month for his arcade space, said his business was down by about 85 percent. "Before we were paying for prime retail space," he said. "Now it's just the subway, not the subway near the World Trade Center."

Mr. Davidov and Mr. Shin have asked the church for a rent reduction, but have succeeded only in buying some time. "I called them up and said, `Please don't squeeze me,' " said Mr. Davidov, who pays $1,140 in rent a month.

Casey R. Kemper, the portfolio manager for the church's real estate, said he could not comment on individual cases. "In general," he said, "we've only been able to go so far." He said the church was trying to resolve differences with its insurance carrier about whether it could collect for the period when the building was closed.

Mr. Kemper said the church empathized with the tenants' plight and was trying to behave responsibly. At the same time, he said, the institution cannot allow its social programs to suffer. "The purpose of our being landlords is to support our four churches — their programs and their benevolences for the community," he said. "That's why we're in the real estate business."

The Collegiate Church has not issued any eviction notices, but other landlords have been more aggressive.

At Golden Island, a five-year-old jewelry store on Chambers Street, Danny Pehzman, the owner, recently received a three-day notice, the first step in an eviction proceeding.

Mr. Pehzman said he had asked for a break on his monthly rent of $8,000 because he lost five weeks' worth of business, in part because the street was often closed to traffic after the attack. He said he was stuck with unclaimed merchandise ordered by customers who no longer want to travel to Lower Manhattan. The state's grant program for small businesses was not much help because he was eligible for just 1.2 percent of his gross receipts, which last year amounted to only $115,000. Like many store owners in Lower Manhattan, he was unable to get a loan from the federal Small Business Administration.

His landlord, Mr. Forrester, said other tenants were managing to pay their rent, though. The jewelry store, which is near the corner of Chambers and Church Streets, is about eight blocks from ground zero and thus too far away to have drawn its customers from the World Trade Center, he said. "They're using this awful tragedy, the fact that people have lost their lives, as a way to posture for rent reduction," Mr. Forrester said.

For 23 years, the Shasho family has sold everything from electronics to jewelry in a storefront at the corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, but for the last two years, the store has been called Vitamins R Us. The current owner, Harry Shasho, who said he was six weeks behind in his $5,600- a-month rent, has received an eviction notice but hopes that the landlord can be talked out of further steps. "It's stupid for a landlord to evict a tenant that's been around for three years or more," Mr. Shasho said.

Mr. Shasho's landlord, a company called Small Commercial Property Owners Group, has sued the Shashos before. "He really needs a push to get him to come up with the rent," said a spokesman for the landlord, who refused to give his name. "We've not evicted him in the past. We're not going to put him out."

Terror Attacks Spawn Nightmares

W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 23 — Darla Deen, from Oregon, dreamed of being trapped in a World Trade Center tower. For New Yorker Sara Ridberg, sleep brought a vision of anthrax spilling on Central Park from a hot-air balloon.

The all-too-real nightmares of life since Sept. 11 have caused many people to have bad dreams.

Even people who don't usually have nightmares are experiencing them.

"They're feeling traumatized by what's going on," said Alan Siegel, a clinical psychologist from Berkeley, Calif., who wrote a book about dreams. "But that's because the world is less secure than it was."

From coast to coast, psychologists, dream researchers and sleep experts have noticed an uptick in the number of people seeking help for the dreams that have haunted their sleep since Sept. 11.

Deen, who's never been to New York, dreamed of being at a new job in the World Trade Center and knowing the attacks were coming. But she went frantically in search of the date — and until she found it, she could not warn anyone.

"I'm just trying to find out the date and no one can tell me," said Deen, 54, a medical transcriptionist in Medford, Ore. She woke up feeling anxious.

After the balloon explodes in Ridberg's nightmare, she goes home with an elderly couple where the news shows Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the terrorist attacks, in Central Park with a gun. He declares war on America. Ridberg prays: "Please God, I want to live. There's so many things I want to do."

Considering all the people who were wounded in the attacks or witnessed them, the emergency crews that responded, and friends and relatives of the dead, tens of thousands of people may be experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — including nightmares, said dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley.

Many of their dreams since Sept. 11 have featured plane crashes or hijackings, buildings collapsing, war, being chased or threatened by terrorists, bin Laden and anthrax.

Such dreams are common for trauma victims. A study by Siegel of 42 people who escaped deadly fires in Oakland Hills, Calif., in 1991 found 13 percent of victims reported themes of disaster, death and dying in their dreams, compared with 5 percent among a control group.

Yet, as frightening as it may sound, nightmares are a good thing, experts say.

Nightmares — dreams with an intense fear that wakes the sleeper — are normal after a crisis. Having them suggests the dreamer is working through the trauma and accepting what happened.

"It's a way that our psyche has of getting through the shock and helping us to understand the world is very different," said Veronica Tonay, chairman of the Association for the Study of Dreams. "It's as if the unconscious is saying over and over again, 'This did happen, this did happen."'

Since Attack, More Landlord-Tenant Clashes Downtown

By SUSAN SAULNY

ensions between landlords and tenants of buildings close to ground zero in downtown Manhattan have led to more rent strikes and threatened evictions in the last week, with several cases to go to mediation in Housing Court over the next month.

Angered by what they say are lagging cleanup efforts and inadequate rent reductions and rent credits after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, hundreds of tenants have organized themselves and decided to withhold rent from landlords.

"You have to understand the level of upset here," said Sudhir Jain, an information technology consultant and representative for his fellow tenants at 50 Battery Place, where he said about 60 of 200 tenants are withholding rent. "We've all gone through a traumatic event. Now to go through the court system with legal proceedings — it's adding another layer to everything that's happened and it's like a slap in the face."

The first case to go to Housing Court mediation will deal with apartment buildings at 32 Pearl Street and 88 Greenwich Street. Some tenants in each building have been withholding rent for two months, said their lawyer, Jack Lester. The case is scheduled to be heard on Thursday.


	Kelly Guenther for The New York Times Residents are back in Battery Park City, but tenants in two buildings are withholding rent, saying cleanup and transportation are still inadequate.

Housing Court mediations are not binding, "but the emphasis is to resolve disputes," Mr. Lester said. "From a practical standpoint, the fact that we have a mediation conference scheduled may set a framework for settlement, which may obviate the need for litigation in other buildings."

Tenants' complaints focus on cleanup and air quality as well as transportation and shopping difficulties since the attack.

The tenants who have organized themselves at 32 Pearl Street are typical of unsatisfied tenants downtown. They say they want to be compensated for hardships that resulted from the Sept. 11 attack or have the option to leave without penalty.

The landlords of 32 Pearl Street have offered a 10 percent rent reduction for the term of the lease. They also offered tenants with medical concerns or children under 19 the option of breaking a lease on 30 days' notice without penalty. Everyone else is required to give 60 days' notice and would have to forfeit their security deposit, said Richard Breton, one of the owners of 32 Pearl Street.

"We're struggling to deal ethically and humanely with our tenants, but we're constrained by the economic factors of operating our buildings," Mr. Breton said. "We're trying to help the tenants and work with them, but they can't expect landlords to provide 100 percent of the relief they seek. We know they're suffering and feel depressed."

Katherine Mogg, president of the tenants' association at 32 Pearl Street, said about 60 percent of the tenants in the 21-unit building are on a rent strike. (Most of the units are two-bedroom apartments and rents average $3,200.)

"We're dealing with fairly major adjustments to our lifestyle," Ms. Mogg said, citing the dearth of transportation and shopping options. "The landlords' response was quite disappointing."

Ms. Mogg said that for weeks after Sept. 11 the tenants found it impossible to communicate with the building's management. Eventually, they organized and wrote the landlords a letter outlining their complaints about failures to clean up and monitor air quality, and the absence of rent credits and reductions.

From the landlords' point of view, the tenants' letter was a "laundry list of demands" about a building that is a quarter-mile from the disaster site, and one not badly damaged in the attacks.

"We've been one of the least affected buildings," Mr. Breton said. "We didn't lose utilities or phone service and were not required to close by any government office." He said he was surprised that the tenants rejected his offer and decided to go on a rent strike.

The level of discontent and disagreement between landlords and tenants seems to be spreading. The number of buildings where tenants are staging rent strikes has grown from two in Battery Park City to at least seven in downtown neighborhoods.

At 88 Greenwich Street, the tenants' association president, Kate Webber-Pitcock, said the building was "full of people who've never not paid a bill in their lives, and who are loath to withhold money." She added, "It is symbolic of how difficult it is to live here that these people would do something like this."

But landlords say they are struggling just to pay operating costs and other expenses, which have not declined since Sept. 11.

"We would like to reach an amicable settlement with our tenants," said Kevin Singleton, the senior vice president of Rockrose Development, which owns two buildings in Battery Park City where tenants are withholding rent. "But their demands in our view have to be consistent with the marketplace."

Mr. Lester said he was optimistic because he believed that the Housing Court hearings offer "an excellent opportunity to mediate settlements."

Mr. Lester said he hoped that a framework would come out of the proceedings that would create a precedent for other tenants living near ground zero.

Students Get Back to Routine, but Sept. 11 Fears Linger

By YILU ZHAO

For many days after she returned to class, Kelly Chan, a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, could not help but be distracted by the horrific scene she witnessed on Sept. 11.

"I would be, like, playing that image over and over in my head," she said. "I just couldn't absorb what went on in the classes."

On that Tuesday, like scores of other classmates, she saw the north tower spewing gigantic flames beyond the windows of her classroom. The scene looked "like a deep cut in the knee, gushing blood," as one classmate described it.

Ms. Chan's grades have dipped somewhat this semester; she isn't sure whether the drop was a result of the attack. Still, her mom has worried out loud, urging her to focus on her schoolwork.

But sheer willpower has not been enough. Ms. Chan has already resumed all her routines. She rides the A train from her Queens home to her downtown school, takes advanced placement European history and plays piccolo in the school band. She still smiles at everybody. But from time to time she has nightmares set off by Sept. 11.

Her lingering reactions, which come more than two months after the attack, are not uncommon at Stuyvesant, one of the city's most competitive public high schools, which is four blocks from the World Trade Center site. The urgency of earning good grades and gaining admissions to top colleges seems to have reclaimed the attention of most of the school's 3,000 students. They say that if they are losing any sleep, it is more because of stress over tests than post- Sept. 11 anxieties.

Many students, preoccupied with appearing strong or unwilling to reopen the healing wound, would rather not talk about their fears with anyone, including the school counselors assigned to help them. And most of these teenagers want to believe that the attack has had no direct impact on their lives.

But in myriad ways, visible and invisible, the terror attack has left its indelible mark on their young lives.

Take Sarah Kahn, a senior and native of Bangladesh. "We are over it now," she declared. "We don't really have time to think about it."

But a moment later, she added, "I am often scared." She is sure that the terrorists will some day bomb the subway, her main means of getting to school. And recently, when a G train she was riding stopped in a tunnel in Brooklyn, she thought she was going to die.

"Some kids are really struggling with it, some are fine," said Holly Ojalvo, an English teacher at Stuyvesant and the student newspaper's faculty adviser. "It's a range."

Ms. Chan and her friends and fellow sophomores, Yvette Wojciechowski and Emily Cooperman, recently exchanged nightmares as they sat in a cafe near their school, giggling and somewhat embarrassed by their reveries.

Ms. Cooperman dreamed of a jet- powered boat speeding into tall buildings, Ms. Wojciechowski of bombs flying overhead as she rode the subway, and Ms. Chan of being stuck in the Empire State Building during a stampede in the dark.

But such candid moments are rare. Discussing their fears only reopens the wounds and can often be embarrassing, they said. Often, these teenagers try their best to pretend that the attack had never happened, but its reminders are abundant, on the streets, in the news media, and even within their school.

The students, for instance, now have to wear ID tags in school. They are no longer allowed to roam outside the building during lunch breaks. And groups of air-quality monitors, in fluorescent orange vests, sometimes come in during classes to test the air.

The air is safe, said the Board of Education's deputy chancellor for operations, David Klasfeld. One hundred air tests are conducted every day at the school, and no toxic substance has been found, though dust levels are occasionally higher than the standards set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. But as many as 80 students and teachers have visited the school nurse with a range of ailments including headaches, itchy eyes, coughs and even bloody noses.

The majority of Stuyvesant students would rather not make such symptoms and signs a big issue. In fact, in conversations with teachers or fellow students, they try not to touch upon the topic of the attack at all.

"Most kids don't seem to want to dwell on it," Ms. Ojalvo. "They want to concentrate on their work."

Anticipating a great need for psychological counseling, Stuyvesant made 19 counselors available to the teenagers. But there was no influx of students seeking their help, probably because they would rather appear strong in front of their peers. "When one of the psychiatrists came to my class and told us we could talk to him about anything, no one really went to him," said Edward Chan, a junior. "He just sort of sat there." The Board of Education confirmed that the counselors had not been busy.

In fact, the students have found their own way toward catharsis. Yesterday, a commemorative magazine issue of the student newspaper, The Spectator, with articles chronicling the emotional reactions of students, was distributed throughout the New York metropolitan region with The New York Times. "Working on the newspaper during this period and keeping their classmates informed have been therapeutic," Ms. Ojalvo said.

In classrooms, the Stuyvesant teachers have generally been quiet about the current events. "The teachers are really busy trying to catch up with the work," said Ms. Wojciechowski. "They cannot afford to lose any more time."

After the attack, Stuyvesant had students stay at home for one week and then housed them for almost two weeks in classrooms of Brooklyn Technical High School. There, the teachers had to squeeze 40-minute classes into 26 minutes due to shortened class periods.

One lingering preoccupation among students since the attack is concern for their Muslim classmates, who number about 30, according to the Board of Education. In the first few days after Sept. 11, when the students were still staying at home, Mohammad Alam, a senior, received many e-mail messages from his non-Muslim friends "to show support and solidarity," he said.

"When we returned to school, my friends were really cool. Nobody said anything about the attack. Everyone just understood everything," he said. "My math teacher came to me and asked me, `Are you O.K.? I have been worried about you.' "

But still, Mr. Alam, 17, prefers not to talk about the attack while at school. A recent immigrant who moved to New York City from Pakistan at age 12, he said he was unwilling to make a judgment on the guilt of Osama bin Laden, or to fight in the United States military in Afghanistan even if he were drafted. Knowing that his views may be controversial, he keeps them to himself.

"I don't want to stir up emotions in people, " he said. "You don't know who has suffered in what way."

Besides, Mr. Alam has college application deadlines to meet. His priorities right now are "to get into a really good college, get a good job afterwards and support my parents and sisters," he said.

Like Mr. Alam, a great number of students at Stuyvesant, where almost half of the school population is Asian, are new immigrants or children of new immigrants. In many cases, the parents' lack of firm roots in this country may have amplified their fear for their children. Ms. Wojciechowski said her parents, who arrived from Poland in 1985, got worried if she didn't call them on her cellphone every few hours.

Similarly, Adeline Lo, a sophomore, said her parents, who arrived in this country from Taiwan as young adults, would not let her visit some of the busiest parts of Manhattan, like Times Square.

But even in the worst of times, these teenagers have managed to discover something good. "I see this as a training for stressful times later in life. It makes me stronger," Ms. Lo said. "Before, I was easily affected by things around me. Like, when a good friend moved away or I got a bad grade, I would be hysterical."

For Ms. Wojciechowski, Sept. 11 has brought a new outlook. "My definition of a bad day has changed," she said. "I sort of think if I can go through this, I can go through anything."

Court Upholds Tougher Rules on Pollution

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

LBANY, Nov. 19 — The state's highest court today upheld a July ruling that the Pataki administration had acted illegally in racing to install so-called minipower plants around New York City without conducting environmental reviews.

The ruling means the plants must undergo time-consuming reviews or risk being shut down. More important, it sided with environmentalists who demanded the plants meet a much stronger standard for particulate pollution than one enforced by the state.

The judges upheld an Appellate Division ruling that ordered the New York Power Authority to study, by Jan. 31, the environmental and health effects of the plants, or risk having them shut down. In a one-sentence notice issued today, the Court of Appeals denied the power authority's motion to appeal the earlier decision.

The decision could have far-reaching consequences. Currently, the state's Environmental Quality Review Act requires that environmental impact studies look at the potential health risks of pollution from any project, and requires that serious problems be addressed by reducing the pollution.

The state has long included soot particles as small as 10 microns in diameter — about one-tenth the width of a human hair — in the list of pollutants that must be studied and controlled.

But a growing body of research shows that particles as small as 2.5 microns across pose a great danger of respiratory diseases like asthma.

And the Appellate Division ruled that, in light of such studies, the state must control bits of soot as small as 2.5 microns, which environmentalists hailed as a huge improvement in the control of particulate pollution. They said that until now, no state had imposed controls on such fine particles.

The ruling "is a huge precedent," said Lisa Garcia, an environmental lawyer who was one of those who argued the case for the New York Public Interest Research Group.

"This means the state now has to look at and control PM 2.5 for every power plant, every factory, every building, every project with traffic impacts," Ms. Garcia said.

The trade group for power plant owners, Independent Power Producers of New York, contends that while the rulings apply to most industrial projects, the many large power plants that have been proposed across the region might be exempt. (The power authority's mini-plants were a different matter because of their size.) Environmentalists and lawmakers who helped write the relevant state laws dismiss that argument, however, as a desperation ploy by companies that did not want to put tougher pollution controls on their power plants.

Glenn D. Haake, general counsel for the power producers' group, said meeting the tougher standard could be prohibitively expensive. "If this court case is deemed to apply to all facilities, that could definitely delay and impede the ability of these projects to be developed," he said.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has said it plans to set nationwide standards for soot as small as 2.5 microns. But that step is probably still years away.

Because the Court of Appeals was upholding a lower-court decision, the case did not carry the force of law across the entire state. It applied, instead, only in the region covered by the Appellate Division, Second Department. But that region — Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island and much of the Hudson Valley — includes half the state's population and most of its proposed power plants.

Lawyers on both sides say that the July ruling will be a guide to courts around the state, however. Having been allowed today by the Court of Appeals to stand, they said, it would likely become the law statewide over time. A case testing the same issues on particulate matter is pending before the Appellate Division that has jurisdiction over Manhattan and the Bronx.

"As a practical matter, 2.5 now becomes the state standard, including for power plants," said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, Democrat of Westchester and chairman of the Environmental Conservation Committee, which supported the lawsuit. "It's unfortunate that we had to get there through the courts, rather than by the administration taking the lead."

The case grew out of the Pataki administration's fears of a power shortage in the metropolitan area, where demand had risen sharply in recent years but supply had not, and where major new plants are not expected to be completed until 2003.

Late last year, the power authority set out to boost the region's power supply by about 400 megawatts, about the output of a medium-sized power plant, by buying 11 natural gas-fired turbines and installing them at seven sites, six in the city and one on Long Island. The authority pursued the $500 million expansion with little public notice or input, determined to have the turbines running by summer. It insisted that it did not have to draft environmental impact statements, which can take months.

The mini-plants are among the cleanest power-generating technologies available, but like anything that burns fossil fuels, they produce pollution. As opponents were quick to note, they were all installed in low- income, mostly minority neighborhoods that already had air pollution problems caused by heavy concentrations of industrial plants.

The power authority pledged to put pollution controls on nearby sources like bus depots and factories, so that there would be no net increase in emissions. Michael Petralia, a spokesman for the agency, said it was still deciding which such projects to pursue.

As it turned out, the turbines helped get the region through a summer that shattered records for demand and strained the power grid almost to the breaking point.

"These generators played a critical role in keeping the lights on in New York City and Long Island," Mr. Petralia said. "We will comply with the court order, and we have already begun to prepare an environmental impact statement. We believe that when the environmental analysis is done, it will find that we operated without adverse environmental impacts."

Toll From Attack at Trade Center Is Down Sharply

By ERIC LIPTON

he official count of the dead and missing in the attack on the World Trade Center has fallen sharply in the last few weeks to below 3,900, a total that is nearly 3,000 fewer than the number city officials, in the first weeks after the towers fell, feared had perished.

City officials said yesterday that the trade center tally, which dropped by at least 200 over the last weekend alone, could continue to fall, perhaps to 3,000, as duplications and errors are resolved. Unofficial compilations by news organizations, using information from companies, the airlines and other sources, so far have reached no higher than 2,950.

The culling of the official list of those killed in the twin towers and on the hijacked airplanes has been proceeding quietly since late September, when the estimated toll reached its high of about 6,500. But this process has taken place largely out of public view, with everyone from world leaders to military officials to newspaper columnists and talk show hosts continuing to believe and assert that 5,000 to 6,000 people died in the attacks on the towers and the Pentagon and aboard the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.

In the last several weeks, in speeches and interviews, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have cited the loss of 5,000 or more people in the attacks. Don Imus, the radio talk show host, put the number for the trade center alone at 6,000 during a television interview on Saturday.

But for weeks, if one used the city's own numbers for the dead and missing in the collapse of the towers, it has been clear that such numbers were wrong. Using the figure released yesterday, the death toll for all three attacks could not be higher than 4,142, and could fall to 3,245 as the city's revisions continue. Either figure would be greater than the total number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, 2,400.

"Thank God so many of these people are alive and well," said Charles V. Campisi, the chief of the New York Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which is supervising the count.

A State Department official in Washington said he was unaware that the number of dead or missing in the trade center attack had decreased so markedly. He said he would bring up the matter with the secretary of state's staff and the press secretary. What is important, he added, is that a still-horrific number of people died on Sept. 11. "It is not to obfuscate or create any more sympathy, because regardless of whether or not it is 3,900 or 5,000, the magnitude and severity of the events on Sept. 11th are clear," said the official, who asked not to be identified because his comments had not been cleared with the department.

The final numbers of those killed in the Pentagon attack and the crash in Pennsylvania have been known for weeks: 189 died at the Pentagon, including 64 on American Airlines Flight 77; and 44 died on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed outside Pittsburgh.

But the city's numbers have been in considerable flux since the first days after the attacks. Yesterday, city officials said the continued large declines in the list of presumed dead were largely a result of identifying people whose names had been registered as missing in the days after the attack, but who in fact survived or were not even in New York that day.

In many other cases, individuals who died in the attack have been listed more than once, like a woman who until yesterday was in the city's database under her maiden name and her married name, Chief Campisi said. Dozens of names have also dropped off as foreign consulates reduced claims of the number of people from their countries who they once believed might have been at the trade center at the time of the attack.

The foreign consulates still list a couple of hundred of their citizens as missing in the trade center attack, and city officials said that this was one area in particular that could lead to further reductions in the total.

As of yesterday, there was some confusion among city and police officials about what the actual city count was. Police officials, who have been working with the city's medical examiner's office and the state courts to improve the accuracy of the list, said they believed the current number of dead and missing to be 3,702.

But the mayor's office put the number at 3,899 and said that the process of incorporating the information from the courts and the medical examiner's office was not yet finished. Nonetheless, the mayor's figure still represented a drop of several hundred from late last week.

City officials would not estimate when they expect to be finished refining the list of missing and dead.

"We are closing in on it," Chief Campisi said.

An official with the city's Law Department who has been coordinating death certificate applications on behalf of victims' families said she expected the final number of dead at the trade center to be between 3,000 and 3,700. "The bottom line here is that it seems as if there are fewer people dead than we originally thought," said Florence A. Hutner, senior counsel at the department.

Researchers and scholars, news organizations and charity officials have all spoken of the fundamental need to establish as accurate a figure as possible for the number of people killed. While most people understood that the city's list of the dead and missing was a work in progress, the knowledge that the toll was going to wind up substantially lower than once feared has been slow to take hold in the public consciousness.

General Myers has repeatedly cited the 5,000-dead number during briefings on the action in Afghanistan, and Secretary Powell mentioned it on Monday during a speech on the Middle East in Louisville, Ky. "It is 69 days since Sept. 11th, when cold-blooded terrorists turned civilian airlines into flying bombs and used them to kill 5,000 innocent people," he said. "That's four or five times the number of people who are assembled here today."

Mr. Imus, in an appearance Saturday on CNN's Larry King Live, asserted that "these idiots, these terrorists, flew an airplane into the World Trade Center and killed 6,000 people." Armstrong Williams, the radio show host, and Chris Matthews, the CNBC talk show host, have used similar numbers in the last week.

Chief Campisi would not comment on the numbers being cited elsewhere, but was committed to reaching a reliable final figure for the city, and the history books. "I would love to finish today, sure," he said, "but we'll do this until we're confident we have the numbers right."

Public Distrusts Gov't Air Tests
By JOE WILLIAMS
Daily News Staff Writer

overnment agencies monitoring the air quality near Ground Zero have lost much of their credibility with the public, Environmental Protection Agency officials and public health experts said yesterday.


	Debris is removed yesterday at Ground Zero, where government monitors say the air is not toxic.

"I think the government has collected a lot of information, but it's clear that some people aren't believing it when they hear it," Dr. George Thurston, an NYU environmental medicine expert, said during a Pace University panel on the environmental impact of the Trade Center attacks.

Whether it's a general post-Watergate mistrust of government agencies or the belief that the city is engaged in spin control to keep businesses alive, the argument that the air is safe is not registering with the public — particularly those who have felt irritation from smoke and dust near Ground Zero, panelists said.

Frosty Parents

EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow said she learned firsthand what type of credibility problem the government has with the chilly reception she received at her daughter's alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, near the World Trade Center site.

Bellow said she expected she would have the inside track toward easing fears about air quality because only last year she was a Stuyvesant parent. "That was completely overridden by the fact that I worked for the government," she said.

"People still have doubts about air quality," said John Cahill, senior policy adviser to Gov. Pataki. He noted that local, state and federal test results have shown no immediate danger to people downtown.

One way to improve the credibility of public health agencies is to have their experts admit more readily that they don't know what the long-term health implications are, doctors said. That's largely because there have been no long-term studies to use for comparison.

"Risk communication is more than spin," said Dr. Phil Landrigan, chairman of community medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center. "If you think it's spin, then you've lost the battle already."

Under Pressure to Spin?

Panelists said there is a perception in the community that city, state and federal governments are pressuring their agencies to put a good spin on information in the effort to rebuild the area.

"If I saw a health risk, I would tell people," said Thurston, a tenured professor. "I'd yell from the rooftop."

Thurston, who said he has been called upon regularly to dispute or verify government information about the air quality downtown, has compared his tests with the EPA's and found the results to be similar.

"I think it is premature to tell people it is safe, but we can tell people we don't see a danger," said Thurston, who noted he has studied only the outskirts of Ground Zero.

Madelyn Wills, chairwoman of Community Board 1, said, "The air may not be toxic, but the air is not safe. There is a distinction here." She said she's had more asthma attacks in the past two months than she had in several years.

Feds, City Ignore Asbestos Cleanup Rules, Says EPA Vet

Juan Gonzalez veteran scientist at the federal Environmental Protection Agency is charging that her agency and the city Health Department are ignoring federal asbestos-abatement law in buildings around the World Trade Center disaster site.

In a scathing memo circulated last week within the agency, Cate Jenkins, a 22-year EPA employee, charged that top brass have "effectively waived" the EPA's "strict national regulations for removal and disposal of asbestos contaminated dust" by recommending that residents and commercial building managers in lower Manhattan follow the "extremely lenient (and arguably illegal) asbestos guidelines of the New York City Department of Health."

In her memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily News, Jenkins noted that the EPA's testing had identified at least 30 locations, some five to seven blocks from Ground Zero, where asbestos levels in dust samples were above the 1% "action level" cited in the federal Clean Air Act.

That law requires elaborate and strict procedures for asbestos removal to be followed and the use of trained asbestos cleanup companies.

"We haven't waived any regulations," said Walter Mugdan, the agency's regional counsel, who insisted Jenkins was misreading the law.

"She [Jenkins] assumes that they [the regulations] apply to the cleaning up of dust in residential or office buildings in lower Manhattan.

"When they were written, they were never intended to apply to something like a terrorist act. These regulations apply to owners and operators of a facility who are carrying out a demolition or renovation. They were never contemplated to apply to someone cleaning an apartment," Mugdan said.

"This is not an academic or scientific argument," Jenkins said yesterday. "Our regulations are very specific. They don't allow you to do this. We've had a breakdown where the federal EPA and the city are scrambling to get everything back to normal, and they're ignoring the law."

Jenkins, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry and works for the agency's Washington-based Hazardous Waste Identification Division in the Office of Solid Waste, said she believes her colleagues "are afraid to say anything."

'Ludicrous' Advice

Some of the advice the Health Department has posted for people on how to remove dust in their apartments, Jenkins said, is "ludicrous." One example, from the department's Web site: "If curtains need to be taken down, take them down slowly to keep dust from circulating."

"EPA regulations do not allow anyone to oversee and perform ... asbestos removal, such as a resident in an apartment building or a building owner," Jenkins said.

EPA administrator Christie Whitman and other top agency officials have repeatedly stressed that a few dozen of more than 1,300 air monitoring tests the agency has done since Sept. 11 have shown asbestos levels above federal safety levels.

"Of course, individual samples represent only a snapshot at a moment in time, not the environmental conditions that would determine whether federal standards have been exceeded," Whitman wrote in an Oct. 31 Op-Ed piece in The News.

In addition, federal and city officials have stressed that the main danger of cancer or asbestosis comes from long-term exposure to the mineral fibers.

The Health Department did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment. But on its Web site, the department says "some asbestos was found in a few of the dust and debris samples taken from the blast site." Still, the city notes: "Most of the air samples taken have been below levels of concern. ... The risk of developing an asbestos-related illness following an exposure of short durations, even to high levels, is extremely low."

The Danger Indoors

But Jenkins noted that outdoor readings could be lower than asbestos readings indoors, where fibers stay unless they are professionally removed.

At least two independent studies of commercial and residential buildings near Ground Zero appear to support her statement.

One of those reports was released yesterday by the Ground Zero Task Force, a coalition of elected officials who represent lower Manhattan.

Those tests, conducted Sept. 18 in two residential buildings near Ground Zero by Cincinnati-based Environmental Quality Management, found asbestos levels far exceeding the federal safety limit.

The other study, conducted in late September by Virginia-based HP Environmental, found that seven of 11 air samples taken from two office buildings within three blocks of Ground Zero exceeded federal standards.

Asbestos Taints Workers' Refuge
By GREG GITTRICH
Daily News Staff Writer

xhausted firefighters and cops — their lungs hurting from the thick air around the collapsed World Trade Center — wandered into the nearby Embassy Suites hotel on Sept. 11 looking for a place to sleep and something to eat.


	Warning signs are plastered to the glass doors of the now-closed Embassy Suites near Ground Zero.

For the next five days, the evacuated hotel served as a refuge for dozens of the city's Bravest and Finest and handfuls of volunteer rescue workers.

It may not have been the best place to go.

The still-closed hotel on the corner of North End Ave. and Vesey St. is the only building in the area with warning signs posted on its windows:

"DANGER. ASBESTOS. CANCER AND LUNG DISEASE HAZARD. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. RESPIRATORS AND PROTECTIVE CLOTHING ARE REQUIRED IN THIS AREA."

Embassy Suites spokeswoman Joyce Baumgarten said yesterday that asbestos tests conducted by the hotel chain "did find some stuff" and crews would begin cleaning it up soon.

But Baumgarten would not release specific data. She said the hotel was "being exceedingly careful because people come there to eat and sleep."

Duct tape sealed the hotel entrance yesterday, apparently to prevent anything from blowing in or out.

"It's not a good thing," said a 42-year-old Bronx firefighter as he walked past the warning signs. The firefighter, who declined to give his name, said he napped on booths inside the hotel's restaurant after the attack.

He wasn't the only one.

Threat to Lungs

Rather than go home, rescue workers slept on cots on the mezzanine level, changed their clothes in deserted administrative offices and ate in the lobby.

Asbestos is known to cause asbestosis, or scarring of the lungs, and lung cancer. Asbestosis results only from long-term exposure. It is unclear if there is a safe level of exposure when it comes to the risk of cancer.

"No one was thinking about that when we were going in there," the firefighter said. "There are more important things to think about, like finding our brothers."

Firefighters around Ground Zero have complained of persistent cough, and a department spokesman said they continue to undergo medical evaluations.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is monitoring asbestos around the World Trade Center site, does not expect anyone who was exposed to the recorded amounts of the fibers to have increased health risks.

The EPA "level of concern" for asbestos is 70 "structures" — fiber, bundle or fine material — per square millimeter if exposure is continuous for an extended period. An EPA air monitor a block from the hotel recorded asbestos levels as high as 118.5 structures per square millimeter, but that was an isolated incident. Levels are now undetectable, officials say.

Nevertheless, an independent study by Virginia-based HP Environmental Inc. found that asbestos levels may be far higher in buildings near Ground Zero.

The company maintains that asbestos was pulverized during the collapse into particles so small they may not have been detected by federal tests.

Safety Guidelines Set For WTC Site Workers
Dems seeking cleanup czar

By GREG GITTRICH and FRANK LOMBARDI
Daily News Staff Writers

overnment and union leaders hammered out guidelines on safety for Ground Zero workers yesterday as a group of elected officials urged Mayor Giuliani to name an environmental cleanup czar for downtown.


	Ground Zero cleanup continues, with World Financial Center in background.

"We want the workers to be safe," said Donna Miles, a spokeswoman for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

While not all the details of the agreement were available yesterday, the pact will require workers to complete a health and safety training program.

"The safety standards are going to be strictly enforced," said Louis Coletti, chairman of the Building Trades Employers' Association, which represents 1,500 construction managers and subcontractors.

Meanwhile, a group of elected officials released a privately conducted air quality study that found extremely high levels of asbestos in two buildings near Ground Zero in mid-September.

Too Many Cooks?

The group, the Ground Zero Elected Officials Task Force, requested "the designation of one city agency to oversee all environmental aspects of the debris cleanup in lower Manhattan."

The members, all Democrats from Manhattan, include Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Borough President Virginia Fields.


Silver and other members of the task force want one city agency to oversee the evironmental aspects of the cleanup.

They complained that a confusing array of city, state and federal agencies have their hands in the cleanup, and that it's often impossible to get reliable information on conditions that Councilwoman Kathryn Freed, a task force member, described as a "toxic soup."

City Hall referred the group to the city Department of Environmental Protection and the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management.

The group cited a study of dust and air samples taken Sept. 18, a week after the Trade Center attack, at a seven-story apartment building at 45 Warren St. — four blocks north of Ground Zero — and a 30-story apartment building at 250 South End Ave. in Battery Park City, just southwest of Ground Zero.

One of the experts who conducted the study was John Kominsky, a chemical engineer based in Cincinnati. Kominsky said the levels of asbestos found in the two buildings far exceeded the maximum level the Environmental Protection Agency deems permissible in schools that have undergone asbestos remediation.

That standard is 70 "structures" — fiber, bundle or fine material — per square millimeter.

The levels found at 45 Warren St. ranged from 279 to 376 structures per square millimeter. At 250 South End Ave., the levels ranged from 6,277 to 10,620 structures per square millimeter.

Kominsky said those levels would cause "significant health risks" if there was long-term exposure. He advised that anyone cleaning up those buildings should know the "proper techniques" for handling asbestos.

No Problems Found

Richard Feldman, who lives at 45 Warren St., said the building was cleaned up before people moved back. He said more recent tests have found no asbestos problem.

A building management representative said 250 South End Ave. was thoroughly cleaned "inside and out" before people returned and that tests are being conducted to make sure the condos remain safe.

South Street Seaport's Vital Fuel, Its Foot Traffic, Slows to a Near Halt

By DENNY LEE

indows were cleaned. Postcards were neatly stacked. Daiquiri machines were filled. But the crowds never arrived.

Employees seemed to outnumber customers on Wednesday night at the South Street Seaport, which has suffered a major drop in visitors since Sept. 11. Edward Hilla, the sales and marketing manager for the seaport, estimates that business plummeted by as much as 80 percent immediately after the attacks.

While business has crept back to nearly 60 percent of its level last year, Mr. Hilla is concerned about the holiday season, a make-or-break time for many stores.

"We're not seeing any tourists at all," Mr. Hilla said. "The majority of our business is being made up by the downtown worker and local residents."

Foot traffic has been so sparse that the 85 seaport stores that are not restaurants now close two hours earlier, at 7 p.m. At the Gap clothing store, which occupies two floors of the Fulton Market Building, not a single person was at the checkout counter at 4:30 p.m. one day last week.

Il Porto, an Italian seafood restaurant that caters mostly to tourists, has laid off 25 waiters and kitchen staff since the seaport reopened in late September. The 10 remaining employees are worried.

"Five parties showed up last night," said Jerman Lopez, the restaurant's assistant manager. "We have more than 100 tables."

Valerie Lewis, a spokeswoman for the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement group, said many visitors, including New Yorkers, were avoiding the seaport because of the misperception that Lower Manhattan is closed.

Fueling that perception are real service disruptions, like telephone shutdowns, and the closing of the southernmost portions of West Street and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

Tour buses to the seaport, which once brought in a steady flow of shoppers, are down by 75 percent compared with last November. The overall drop in tourism in the city is one reason; another is that there are fewer attractions in Lower Manhattan.

"Think about what we've lost," Ms. Lewis said. "The top of the World Trade Center was one of the biggest attractions." Ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, she added, remain closed.

Of the few tourists who were at the seaport, some regretted coming.

"It feels closed," said Jane Gregory, who was visiting from Berkshire, England. "We can't get a drink because we have no cash, and the A.T.M. machine is not working."

Many shop owners fault seaport management for failing to publicize its reopening on Sept. 19. But Mr. Hilla, the seaport's marketing manager, said advertisements had been placed in New York newspapers asking visitors to "rediscover the seaport."

Nonetheless, bar stools were as cold as the beers Wednesday at MacMenamin's, an Irish pub that was among the original tenants of Pier 17 when it opened in 1985. "There doesn't seem to be anyone enjoying happy hour," said Jack Barouh, who was meeting colleagues for drinks elsewhere.

Joseph Donovan, the bartender at MacMenamin's, said that he was not sure whether October's bar receipts would be enough to cover the $20,000 monthly rent.

"Everyone is struggling," he said. "I hear through the grapevine that two or three stores might close in the new year."

For the Jobless, the Waiting Stretches On

By JOYCE PURNICK

THOUSANDS are out of work in and around New York City. About 79,000 jobs disappeared from the city in October alone in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the economy was weakening long before then. Matters talked to scores of people at the city's first Twin Towers Job Expo on Oct. 17 and reached some of them again over the weekend to see how they were doing. Most are still unemployed. They don't like to complain. As one said, "I am alive and healthy."

But they worry, and their worries are New York's:

Sabina Rendall of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. A single mother, 44, laid off in March from the accounting department of Radisson Hotels.

"I went to two job fairs; no one ever called me back. I go looking for a job every day. I make it like a 9-to-5 schedule.

"My unemployment ran out in September. I've never been without a job this long. My parents live downstairs; they can help awhile, but how much can they help? I have a daughter; she just turned 12. When school started, I bought her two pants and two shirts because I couldn't afford more.

"Pretty soon they are going to cut out everything — the phone, Con Ed, gas. I don't know. I'm just waiting for a miracle."

Louise Marino, 55, of Rego Park, Queens. Laid off in June from the accounting department of Edison Schools .

"In the last 10 days I've been getting a lot of calls. Maybe I have something pending now, I hope.

"It's the economy. Michael, my son, is also unemployed. He worked in a clerical capacity for Reuters. He will be graduated from college in June. He's been trying to look for a job, and there's nothing out there.

"I have only eight weeks of unemployment left — $405 a week. I buy things in bulk. We used to have more steak, chicken, fish. Now it's kind of like macaroni and lots of hamburger. My friend takes me to Costco. I get three dozen eggs for $2.29. I don't buy name-brand items. I cut coupons.

"I'll tell you, when you can save $6 cutting coupons, that's a lot of money. And we put all our loose change in a bottle. It adds up. We saved $500 last year. People say $500 is not a lot of money, but oh yes it is."

James Sestito, 31, a marketing director from Neptune City, N.J., laid off on Sept. 26 by a company that organizes business conferences.

"I've handed or sent out 170 résumés altogether, but I've gotten only three serious calls. A lot are looking to fill sales positions. That's not what I do.

"I met with a couple of headhunters, I answer ads in the papers, but so far, no luck. My wife's a receptionist in a law office. We met in high school. She's taken a second job at night at a local supermarket. I'm doing odd jobs; I have some savings and family. Hopefully it won't be much longer."

Sari Gadlin of the Upper West Side, a meeting planner laid off in April from a nonprofit association.

"People are not wanting to get on planes and travel; companies are not wanting to pay for their people go to meetings and schmooze at lunches.

"My roommate is a facialist. No business. Do you need to get a facial? She came back from a visit to Charlotte, said, `I'm going back.' She said they are not hit. I think a lot of it is New York. It's obviously nationwide, but especially in New York.

"If you would have told me at 37 I would be unemployed — with 12 years' experience, and I'm good at what I do, I have good references — if I got myself stuck in that mode, I'd be in trouble. But I get up early, I go to the gym, my apartment has never been cleaner. I have no husband, no children; it was always my career. I was where I wanted to be. This is devastating."

Steven Steinhart, 33, a lawyer from Highland Park, N.J., whose firm on Church Street downtown was displaced by the Sept. 11 attack. He begins a new job today.

"I am very fortunate. I saw a job listing in The Law Journal, I thought it was a good fit and was fortunate enough to be hired.

"I am grateful, to my wife and to God, that the whole situation is over."

Cristina Giovine, 26, of Toms River, N.J., a marketing specialist unemployed since March, when YOUpowered.com, an Internet startup, folded. She gave up her Manhattan sublet to move back home.

"I am looking continuously. The world seems to have gone crazy. A friend works for a pharmaceutical company. My résumé was submitted a couple of weeks ago. I might substitute teach, something to get out of bed for in the morning, which, at this stage of the game, is a good thing to do, to feel like you're part of society.

"I think New York will be up after the new year. New York has no use for me now, but I'm coming back."

Since Sept. 11, Vacant Offices and Lost Vigor

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

he renaissance that began in Lower Manhattan in the late 1990's is now in reverse. Six office towers totaling 13.45 million square feet were destroyed in the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, yet the buildings that remain have not filled up with tenants. In fact, there is a lot more empty office space downtown today than before the attack.

As a result, restaurants, retailers and small businesses are complaining that the office workers who once clogged the winding streets have disappeared. And some residents near the trade center are fleeing their apartments rather than face being reminded of the thousands of people who lost their lives in the still-smoldering rubble.

According to Newmark & Company, there is 13.2 million square feet of vacant office space available in Lower Manhattan, up 49 percent, or 4.3 million square feet, since the firm surveyed the market on Sept. 10. In an illustration of both a flagging economy and concerns about life in Lower Manhattan, nearly half the available space came from corporate tenants that no longer need it because of layoffs or relocation to Midtown, Brooklyn or the suburbs.

"It turned out that an awful lot of companies had excess inventory," said Jonathan Litt, senior real estate analyst for Salomon Smith Barney. "There's not a huge incentive to operate in Lower Manhattan today, because the transportation network is not operating. Five years from now when there's a redevelopment plan in place, it will continue to be a viable and vibrant business center."

No one is predicting the demise of New York as the international financial capital. Still, the trade center attack is accelerating the dispersal of financial institutions from Lower Manhattan to Midtown and Jersey City. But Mr. Litt said that as long as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the Depository Trust, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs , Deutsche Bank and Salomon Smith Barney stayed downtown, Lower Manhattan should retain its central role.

"It is very hard to unwind brain-trust markets like New York for the financial industry or San Francisco for the technology industry and move them to another city," Mr. Litt said. "There's just too much talent located in those markets."

But the ranks are thinning and some analysts, urban planners and developers say that Mr. Litt is being overly optimistic, adding that it may take 10 years for Lower Manhattan to recover fully.

It is not just that a former trade center tenant like Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield decided to move its operations and 1,900 employees to Brooklyn and Midtown. Lehman Brothers , whose tower at the nearby World Financial Center suffered some structural damage, decided to move most of its operations to a new skyscraper nearing completion in Midtown, at Seventh Avenue and 50th Street. It is leaving behind about 1.8 million square feet of vacant office space downtown that will be available in about 14 months when the damage to the tower is repaired.

American Express , which had about 1 million square feet in the same building at the World Financial Center, is negotiating to move its headquarters to 787 Seventh Avenue at 52nd Street, and has leased additional office space in New Jersey.

Merrill Lynch has begun moving 6,000 employees back into the World Financial Center from temporary office space. But the investment bank, which is in the midst of another round of layoffs, is also putting a 400,000-square- foot block of vacant space there on the market, according to Richard Silverman, a spokesman for the company.

Goldman Sachs & Company, which has had a voracious appetite for downtown real estate in recent years, is quietly subleasing all of its space at 1 Liberty Plaza, the tower on the east side of the World Trade Center site, to other companies.

Randy Bradley, executive vice president of Gruntal & Company, said the retail investment broker planned to move back to 1 Liberty Plaza. But because of layoffs, Gruntal will only be using about 60,000 square feet of its space and subleasing the remaining 130,000.

"We're going back into an environment where it's more difficult to get around," Mr. Bradley said. "And then there's this devastation next door. I'm hoping it'll be a whole different ballgame once it becomes a construction site."

It is against this grim backdrop that Gov. George E. Pataki is putting together the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to funnel federal and state money into the revitalization of Lower Manhattan, not just the trade center site.

The city's Independent Budget Office estimates that city revenues will fall short by $925 million this year and as much as $1.8 billion next year, due in large part to layoffs in the securities industry, a drop in Wall Street profits and the loss of tax revenue from downtown buildings.

It remains unclear, however, how much federal money will flow into New York. The White House and Congress have moved to give New York only $9.2 billion of a promised $20 billion in aid. An attempt to get another $9.73 billion in aid failed in a House committee on Wednesday. And the governor's lavish $54 billion aid request last month stalled amid criticism in Washington.

But the problems downtown faces today are also shaping the debate over what Lower Manhattan should look like in the future.

In the days after the attack, many developers and city officials had argued with patriotic fervor that if six big office towers had been destroyed, then six new buildings should be built immediately, with government subsidies to stimulate construction.

But it soon became apparent that there was little demand for new office space. In the short term at least, real estate brokers said, any corporations that want to expand or move downtown, where rents are lower than in Midtown, can lease vacant space in existing buildings.

Some analysts and state officials now contend that it is more important to fix longstanding problems in Lower Manhattan, and to make the area more attractive to tourists and residential and commercial tenants.

"This is probably the fifth major crisis of confidence in downtown since 1959," said Robert D. Yaro, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, a private planning organization. "The solution has always been to subsidize some more office space. We don't deal with the fundamental problems in the neighborhood: you can't get there from here. The residential population in and around downtown is still only a fraction of what it should be, and it needs amenities like culture, arts, restaurants and retailing."

Mr. Yaro and others have proposed subway and rail improvements linking Lower Manhattan to Midtown and Westchester to the north, and to Brooklyn and Long Island to the east. He and a coalition of 80 civic groups have also called for a comprehensive plan that would reflect a more diverse economy and include residential development, cultural institutions and shopping, as well as office space and a substantial memorial park dedicated to the victims of the terror attack.

Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, said the Pataki administration was focused on the long-term needs of Lower Manhattan, in particular, transportation. He said he favored building a terminal that would link a rebuilt PATH station at the trade center site with existing subway lines to the east. The state is also considering ways to better connect Battery Park City and the World Financial Center to the rest of Lower Manhattan by burying a stretch of West Street, which separates the enclave from the World Trade Center.

"It's important to focus on what's going to be helpful in the long term to revitalize Lower Manhattan, making it a place where people want to live, work and visit during the day and at night," Mr. Gargano said. "It's about transportation, transportation, transportation. When the market comes back, we're hoping that private developers will put up new buildings."

Mr. Gargano said he has also encouraged Larry Silverstein, the developer of 7 World Trade Center, to use the insurance money he expects to get to rebuild his tower, which was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack. As for the trade center site itself, Mr. Gargano said it would take perhaps a year to clear the land. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns the site and would plan for its redevelopment, "but we do not have to follow the same design as in the past," Mr. Gargano said.

In the meantime, downtown tenants and landlords said that it remained difficult to move around the district because of the loss of a PATH rail terminal and three subway stations at or near the trade center. Many downtown workers and residents near the trade center also complained that the smoky, acrid air near the trade center site was an unwelcome reminder of the attack.

They said that too little had been done to assure companies that the problems would be fixed soon and to stave off another round of defections.

"Businesses are making their decisions right now as to what they're doing going forward," said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the New York City Partnership. "They want to have some certainty that downtown will return to normalcy and the level of amenities we had before the attack."

Ms. Wylde also worried that many of the transportation proposals by the Regional Plan Association and others were too expensive and grandiose and would be a distraction from getting the downtown PATH and subway stations reopened.

"The focus of public investment should be on infrastructure and making downtown more attractive for private investment," Ms. Wylde said.

Awash in Grief After Attack, Adrift in a Sea of Paperwork

By JANNY SCOTT

eryl Mayo's to-do list is measurable not in length but in thickness. It is an accordion file, royal blue and encyclopedia-fat — a gift from a prescient sister-in-law who somehow knew in the first days after Mrs. Mayo's husband was killed that paperwork management would become a spouse's survival skill.

The file has a dozen pockets for sorting the documents that have become Mrs. Mayo's second job in the 10 weeks since her husband, Robert J. Mayo, died in the World Trade Center attack: the birth certificates, marriage certificate, death certificate, mortgage papers, pay stubs, correspondence, checklists, current bills and innumerable, interminable applications for help.

Some forms are simple, others baffling; most agencies well-intentioned but human. One agency asked for a copy of an itemized funeral bill, even after Mrs. Mayo had explained that she had no bill because she had no body. Another agency wrote Mrs. Mayo a check for $1,500; when she got back to her home in Morganville, N.J., she realized that the check had not been signed.

Mrs. Mayo, whose husband was a deputy fire-safety director at the trade center, says she lost 75 percent of the family's household income when he was killed. To try to hold on to the split-level house where she lives with their 11-year-old son, she believes, she has no choice but to pursue every opportunity for assistance, and to do it soon, in case help dries up.

But the system, she and others say, is turning widows and widowers into beggars. There is little coordination and no central database in which every family's information is kept, so family members are asked for the same catalog of facts again and again. There are lists of several hundred government and charitable organizations on various Web sites, but who has the time to figure out which to approach?

Relatives of disaster victims often find themselves drowning in paper. But the magnitude of the trade center attack and the sympathy it inspired seem to have compounded the problem. And while many government agencies and charitable organizations have already acknowledged the limitations of the system, it is in the daily struggle of people like Mrs. Mayo that it is most apparent.

Agencies want every imaginable document, from original copies of birth certificates to hard copies of recent bills. Government agencies want to know first how much money other government agencies are planning to give. Survivors compare notes in support groups and discover that some receive twice as much money as others. They wonder whether it is the need that is greater, or just the expense of a more lavish life.

Mrs. Mayo, who works six hours a day as an office manager, now spends hours every day trying to piece together a clear picture of her financial future — applying for assistance, following up, tracking down documents, scouring the Internet for leads, meeting with other widows, commuting into Manhattan to the city's family assistance center and exploring ways to cut expenses.

All of which seems to leave little time for grief.

One morning recently, Mrs. Mayo found herself emptying the dishwasher in that oddly silent window of time between a child's leaving for school and a parent's heading for work. She had about 15 things to do before leaving the house. Looking around, all she saw were unpaid bills, uncompleted paperwork, surfaces awash in paper.

"Everything was scattered all over the place," Mrs. Mayo recalled. "And then I thought about all the things I had to do and all the laundry that was overflowing from the hamper. And I felt so overwhelmed that I broke down so badly, I couldn't even catch my breath. I sat down on the floor, just like, `I have to do this. I have to cry now.' And I did."

Mrs. Mayo's odyssey through the bureaucracy began at the Armory at 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, where she waited for hours in those first days to file a missing person's report, then took her not long afterward to the family assistance center at Pier 94, where she watched detectives meticulously bag and catalog her husband's nail clippers and razor as sources of his DNA.

At that first visit to the family center, she said, the New York State Crime Victims Board issued her an immediate $1,200 check and sent her off with a list of documents she would be expected to supply — from canceled checks for out-of-pocket expenses, to statements of death benefits from any source and copies of other government agencies' decisions on her requests for benefits.

There was a list of X's in the margin, some circled, some not. Back at home, Mrs. Mayo called the board's office in Albany, confused. Can you please explain exactly what you need? she asked. The woman on the other end was "very, very curt," Mrs. Mayo said. She let it pass, rather than risk alienating someone who might help her. But it hurt.

Back at the family center a week later, Safe Horizons, a nonprofit agency, issued her a $1,500 check on the spot, along with a commitment to do the same every two weeks if each time she would bring in bills totaling that amount. She applied for Social Security benefits for her son, Corbin, a process she described as refreshingly simple.

Her attempt to get workers' compensation benefits went less easily. According to Mrs. Mayo, the interview at the city's family assistance center took hours, and the representative wrote down the wrong employer for Mr. Mayo.

When the paperwork reached Mrs. Mayo weeks later, she said, she decided to go to New Jersey's family assistance center at Liberty State Park to refile it.

A few lessons learned fast: Carry all documents with you at all times; make multiple copies of bills; keep the originals in the front section of your accordion file, at the ready. Everyone wants pay stubs. Bring along original birth certificates and the marriage license, but also bring copies so you will not have to wait for someone else to make one.

There have been surprises, good and bad. The lawyer who handled Mrs. Mayo's application for a death certificate was so sensitive and efficient that Mrs. Mayo was thinking of writing her a thank-you note. But when Mrs. Mayo appealed to her mortgage company for help, the company sent her a lengthy application that she said would have given the company the right to charge her extra when her payments resumed.

Appalled, she declined.

Mrs. Mayo has appealed to Trenton for property tax relief, to no avail. She meets regularly with a support group for relatives of people killed in the trade center. They have divided the task of researching other sources of help. She now uses a nylon briefcase for lugging around the blue accordion file, which has overflowed into a second file at home.

Like many others, she now takes the view that officials should simply divide up the money for family members and distribute it in equal lump sums, rather than spend time trying to calibrate grants to specific need. The longer agencies puzzle over relative need, the more money they will fritter away on administrative costs, many family members now say.

"I see some who have less than me, and they don't have money for food or diapers and they're really struggling," Mrs. Mayo said. "Then I see others who have an enormous amount more than me. They live in mansions with tennis courts and pools and all kinds of luxury cars. And they're getting, based upon their need, enormous sums of money, a lot more than I'm getting."

Mrs. Mayo returned to her job as an office manager a month ago and found herself swamped with work. The company she works for installs office furniture and had clients in the World Trade Center; they relocated en masse. Robbed of her appetite, she finds it hard to eat. Having difficulty sleeping, she tried sleeping pills, then stopped, fearing she was looking forward to them too much.

Haunted by a new sense of vulnerability and convinced that she and her husband were not prepared for what happened, she recently took out a life insurance policy on herself. She is struck by the way her husband left things — his clothes on a chair, his cap on a hook in the garage, traces of what now seems a naïve confidence that he would be home that night.

Mrs. Mayo has also discussed with Corbin the need to save money.

"I just told him that we need to be realistic," she said last week. "And it's important that we keep our home because Daddy loved this home very much. This was his dream home, and he did a lot of work here himself. He had his heart and soul in here. This is the place that makes us feel safe. And I feel like, if I leave here, I'll be leaving part of him."

Cultural Lifeblood Of City Still Reeling
By PAUL H.B. SHIN

he Sept. 11 attacks have punched a gaping hole in the budgets of the city's cultural institutions that could result in large-scale layoffs, a new study warns.

All of the 150 organizations surveyed — for-profit and nonprofit — have stopped hiring or let some staffers go since September. Many theaters, museums, zoos and orchestras, which make up a $13 billion annual industry, also have been forced to cut programs or performances, according to the report by the Center for an Urban Future.

"The lights have begun to dim at a number of these institutions," said Neil Scott Kleiman, director of the Manhattan-based think tank that compiled the report, to be published today.

Most have taken hits in at least one of three major funding sources — ticket sales, philanthropic donations or government funding.

Loss of Thousands of Jobs

Labor groups' early predictions that the theater sector alone could cut as many as 8,000 jobs may have been too pessimistic, Kleiman said. But layoffs in all cultural institutions could still number "in the thousands" in the next several months, he said.

Kleiman said government support of cultural institutions should play an integral role in rebuilding the city's economy.

"The bottom line is if our city lets the arts fall, the rest of the economy will just shrivel," Kleiman said.

He advocated passage of a bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to create a Broadway Empowerment Zone to fund fledgling productions.

Small institutions that live hand to mouth have been hit particularly hard, the report said.

For example, the BAT Theatre in Tribeca lost $800 a day in the month following the destruction of the twin towers.

"We're finally starting to see the same number of people in the audience, but it's taken this long," associate producer Erik Sniedze said.

Larger institutions that receive government funding were forced to make further cutbacks in October after Mayor Giuliani ordered a 15% budget cut for all city agencies, including the Cultural Affairs Department.

The New York Hall of Science in Queens — one of 34 cultural institutions that operates on city land and gets generous city benefits — expects to lose $300,000 in city funding this year, said Director Alan Friedman.

Making Difference Locally

The anemic attendance at Broadway shows immediately after Sept. 11 has rebounded to last year's level — but thanks largely to local audiences. People from the city and its suburbs made up 50% of Broadway and off-Broadway audiences in October, compared with 39% last year, according to the League of American Theatres and Producers.

Giuliani attributed the surge to "defiance and a desire to be patriotic."

"People are just saying, 'We're not going to let [terrorists] frighten us,'" Giuliani said.

With Lisa L. Colangelo

Family Exodus Hurts Kids, Too

By NANCIE L. KATZ
Daily News Staff Writer

f it weren't for the fish tank in her Hoboken, N.J., apartment, 5-year-old Shauna Arnette might not get to school. Each day, feeding the fish gets Shauna up at 6 a.m. Then she hurries to get ready for her 80-minute trek to school.


	Shauna rides train with mom, Sharon Arnette, and mom’s fiance, David Cook, as part of 80-minute trek to school.

Before Sept. 11, Shauna and her family thought they had it made. They lived in Battery Park City a few blocks from her mom's job and Public School 89, where Shauna had just started kindergarten with her preschool friends.

The family joined a close-knit community where parents exchange good mornings in a courtyard at the school on West and Warren Sts., shadowed by the World Trade Center.

That was before Sept. 11.

"Everything was lovely, wonderful, convenient and that lasted all of four days," David Cook, who is engaged to Shauna's mother, recalled as the little girl gazed out a bus window an hour into their morning journey. "Some parents just disappeared. The commute is costly, time-consuming and the payoff to maintain the community is shrinking.

After hijacked jets destroyed the twin towers, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of Battery Park City families, Cook and Shauna's mom, Sharon Arnette, found a temporary place they could afford in Hoboken.

Not sure when they can go back to their building in Battery Park City — or if they want to — the family is resigned to an exhausting daily ritual.

First, there is a 20-minute bus ride to the PATH station. A 15-minute train ride later, they wait in the November chill for a Board of Education bus on Washington St. Then it's another 30 minutes until Cook and Shauna cross the lower East Side and arrive at PS 89's temporary home at a school on Avenue D and Columbia St.

"This is our plight," said Sharon Arnette. "It's serious. This is her education. She looks at us like we have lost our minds, 'You're getting me up before the sun?'"

PS 89 parents don't compare their plight to those who lost loved ones in the disaster. But like scores of other families living near the Trade Center, when the towers crumbled, so did their lives.

Community in Limbo

"We not only lost our school, we lost our homes," said David Bushman, co-president of PS 89's Parent Teacher Association, whose 9-year-old daughter's best friend moved away on Sept. 11. "Our whole sense of community was destroyed. These incredibly tight relationships which took years to build up were torn apart in the course of a day."


Susan Beckert (r.) holds son, Emerson, 15 months, as she picks up her other sons Sebastian, 7 (l.), and Elliott, 4, in day that leaves no time for much more than travel and school.

Besides lodging and transportation costs, the displaced have also spent thousands of dollars to clean damaged carpets, clothes and other possessions. Counselors have exhorted anxious parents to keep kids surrounded by familiar faces at the schools they cherish. That hasn't been easy.

Relocated to far-flung neighborhoods across bridges and rivers, parents spend hours getting their children to and from school on buses, trains, taxis and ferries.

Getting to PS 89 in the subway-challenged lower East Side has been particularly tough. Only 250 of the school's 420 registered students are still enrolled. Only half of 89 kindergartners are left.

Susan Beckert moved with her family from Battery Park City to Jersey City. Each day, with her 15-month-old son in tow, Beckert drives through the Holland Tunnel to drop Elliott, 4, at PS 3's preschool on Hudson St. in the West Village. Then she goes across town to PS 89 for Sebastian, 7.

No Respite

Beckert kills time until midday, when she returns to PS 3 to fetch Elliott. Then she kills more time — pet stores and cafes are prime distractions — until it's time to pick up Sebastian at 2:45 p.m. The family is usually back in Jersey City at 4:15 p.m.

Beckert spends $850 each month to rent a car and park it. But it's not the finances that bother her. "It's just I spend my whole day getting my kids an education," she said. "It's not being able to have any down time for the last eight weeks. That is the stress."

Although parents commend the Board of Education for setting up an elaborate busing system with nine routes across Manhattan, they say it's not enough. What happens if a child misses the bus? What used to be a short walk is now an expensive cab ride and a morning missed at work.

Parents say board and local district officials rejected their requests for a fund to help them cover transportation costs out of the more than $1 million in donations since Sept. 11.

Board of Ed spokeswoman Margie Feinberg said there is money available to help families. "If parents feel they are still in need of something, it is important they speak to their principal so that she can let us know what they need," she said.

District 2 spokesman Roy Moscowitz also said the district's money was available for "extraordinary circumstances."

Back in Hoboken, after a round-trip, nearly three-hour journey to Shauna's school and back, Cook worries how they will manage next month when he travels to Germany for training in his new job as a management consultant. Arnette works full-time as an office manager in lower Manhattan.

"Before, I had the chance to set everything up for Shauna before starting work," he said. "Now we are just in this bind."

Downtown Air's Risky, M.D. Warns
By PETE DONOHUE and FRANK LOMBARDI, Daily News Staff Writers

espite official assurances that the air in lower Manhattan is safe to breathe, an occupational health expert testified yesterday that it is causing serious respiratory ailments.

"We did not anticipate that we would see this problem to such an extent among those working or living peripheral to Ground Zero," said Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of occupational and environmental diseases at Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Levin testified at the second session of a City Council hearing on the environmental impacts of the World Trade Center attack.

He strongly disputed assurances by government officials last week that air in the neighborhood poses no long-term health risks, except at Ground Zero — where smoldering fires continue to emit noxious fumes eight weeks after the terror attack.

"Our clinical experience tells us something quite different," Levin told the Council's Environmental Protection Committee.

Levin said his clinic at Mount Sinai is seeing more instances of "airway dysfunction" problems among patients "who work in office buildings two, three and four blocks from Ground Zero."

Airway Diseases Seen

He said patients show symptoms of what he called reactive airway disease, such as coughing, wheezing, sore throats, hoarseness and pressure in the chest.

Levin said the problem is being caused by gases that will be carried downwind "as long as those fires are still cooking."

He urged people with a history of respiratory problems to wear filtered respirators similar to those used by Ground Zero workers.

Peter Iwanowicz of the American Lung Association testified that health risks also are being posed by increased diesel exhaust fumes from the armada of trucks and construction equipment being used to clear debris from Ground Zero.

David Newman, an industrial hygienist for the nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, said there is danger from asbestos in the dust found in downtown office buildings and apartments.

In a related development, Transport Workers Union Local 100 says it has requested that the state Labor Department do air monitoring tests at 14 subway stations in lower Manhattan. They include the Rector St. station and the currently shuttered Cortlandt St. station on the N and R line, and the Bowling Green station on the No. 4 and No. 5 line, said Darlyene Lawson, vice president of the subway stations division.

Urge Tax Break For Those Who Live Downtown

By ERIC HERMAN, Daily News Business Writer

$5 billion federal recovery package to help lower Manhattan could leave neighborhood people out in the cold.

Although the area is known as the city's financial center, downtown is also home to about 25,000 people, some of whom have fled since the Sept. 11 attacks. Real estate executives view the retention of neighborhood people as the key to the area's revitalization.

But the bill now moving through the Senate Finance Committee omits an income tax credit designed to help them.

"At the moment it's not in there, and we think it's a major problem," said Steve Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

The committee is putting the finishing touches on a broader economic stimulus package that would include $5 billion in aid for lower Manhattan. In its current form, the bill includes a $4,800 annual per-employee tax credit for downtown businesses and authority to issue tax-exempt bonds to help rebuilding.

But New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton also had been pressing for an income tax credit of about $3,000 for anyone who lived below Canal St. — a goal that has proved elusive so far.

"They're both very upset about it, but they're also trying to make sure that New York City gets something out of the stimulus package," Spinola said.

Aides to Schumer and Clinton said the senators were still fighting for the provision. The Senate has yet to vote on the stimulus package, and any final version would result from a compromise with the House, which has passed a $100 billion economic plan with no specific provisions for New York.

Schumer said $700 million already had been approved for federal community development block grants, which could be used to help those who live in the area.

"There's always more than one way to skin a cat," Schumer said.

Spinola praised Schumer and Clinton for "scheming and arguing" for the residential tax credits. But writing new tax laws for a small geographic area has proven difficult, he said.

"We now have tenants who are making decisions over the next few months about whether they're going to stay there," Spinola said.

Hard Times for Landlords

Landlords of downtown apartment buildings also expressed disappointment.

"I think it's a terrible mistake," said Richard LeFrak, president of the Lefrak Organization, owner of several apartment buildings in Battery Park City. "The way you stabilize downtown first is by having happy campers living downtown."

Separately, New York lawmakers said they're seeking an additional $11 billion to help lower Manhattan recover as they seemed to be steering toward a showdown with President Bush.

Bush has threatened to veto legislation that exceeds the $40 billion in emergency funds Congress already has provided.

Separately, Bush has pledged $20 billion in new spending to aid New York City. The House and Senate Appropriations committees are still working on their bills, but New York already has received $2.5 billion in emergency funds, said an aide to Rep. James Walsh (R-Syracuse).

Past Lessons Guide Transit Planning for Attack

By JAMES GLANZ and RANDY KENNEDY


	James Estrin/The New York Times The difficulty of quickly escaping the subway and the ease with which biological agents can spread have long worried transit officials.

esterday morning was the kind that has come to be considered normal in the subway.

A "suspicious substance" on a stairway at the 59th Street station, disrupting service on the A, B, C and D lines for an hour during the rush. "Suspicious powder" at the 205th Street station, snarling D service in the Bronx, and more powder at 34th Street, suspending service on part of the B, D and F lines. All of the reports turned out to be false alarms.

For the last month, as the specter of anthrax attacks has grown, every morning's descent into the subway has become a journey into uncertainty and overcrowding for thousands of passengers, who wonder when the system will return to normal.

Transit officials warn that it could be a very long time. They, along with federal agencies and research scientists, are now operating the system as if a nearly unthinkable prospect could occur: a biological or chemical attack in the confined spaces of the subway.

Still, this is not the first time scientists and transit officials have considered that prospect and tried to gauge the vulnerability.

In June 1966, Army scientists smashed light bulbs filled with bacteria believed to be harmless in the New York subway and found that the agent was carried for miles, confirming their worry that a deadly agent could be spread widely and quickly through the subway.

And in the last several years, computer models have been produced to simulate how something like anthrax might move through the subway system. Again, the results were disturbing.

For health and law enforcement officials, though, there has been an upside to the disquieting research, for they have used the lessons learned to consider how best to respond. For instance, new technologies include a recently developed foam to destroy chemical and biological agents.

Officials are extremely reluctant to divulge details of any new response plans that have been put in place in many cities or to describe work on technologies that could make subways safer.

But the officials say they have made progress in improving their emergency planning and in laboratory research efforts.

Some of those new possibilities have already emerged from labs and are being tested in subways, said Jonathan Kiell, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which has a program to finance research and testing of new technologies for countering biological and chemical threats.

Cheryl Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said officials planned to use some of the new technologies, including chemical sensors and computerized alert systems, in a simulated subway attack that may happen sometime this year. "The intent, of course, is to share the results of the program with transit agencies in this country and around the world," Ms. Johnson said yesterday.

The difficulty of quickly escaping from a subway, combined with the way in which the drafts created by moving trains could spread chemicals or biological agents, has long worried transportation officials.

"The subway is a problem, let's just put it that way," said Dr. William Dunn, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who works with the Energy Department program, called Protect, an acronym for Program for Response Options and Technology Enhancement for Chemical/Biological Terrorism. "And we're trying to address it."

On the most practical level, those efforts involve making detailed emergency plans and testing them. "We continue to review emergency plans, and at this point feel as comfortable as you can in this environment," said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.

Mr. Kelly refused to divulge more details, but people involved with Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union say they have been reassured by the precautions that the transportation authority has taken so far to deal with the possibility of a biological attack.

When suspicious substances are reported, they said, police officers and transit workers immediately begin a procedure of evacuating the station, stopping train service, closing the doors of the trains in the station and turning off their motors, to minimize the possibility that powders or gases could be swirled or spread by the trains.

Transit officials have apparently also been vigilant about ensuring that no workers untrained in dealing with hazardous materials go near suspicious substances or try to clean them up, actions that could also serve to spread the substance.

As officials review and practice those measures, said Allen Morrison, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, "there's a great reluctance to go into a lot of details on security plans." But he said that officials at the Port Authority, which controls the PATH trains, the three major local airports and several bridges and tunnels, were eager to let riders know that chemical and biological terrorism had been considered in those plans.

New ways of coping with those worries are also beginning to arrive from research laboratories. In an article published in Tunnel Management International in April, J. Greg Sanchez, project engineer in capital program management for New York City Transit, a unit of the transportation authority, described the development of a computer program that can simulate biological and chemical attacks in a subway and assess the effectiveness of specific emergency plans.

The research, which Mr. Sanchez and two scientists at Argonne National Laboratory performed as part of the Protect program, is meant to help develop guidelines for saving lives in a real attack. "We are trying to develop intelligence as to what mitigations are out there," Mr. Sanchez said.

In other research sponsored by the program, Sandia National Laboratories has developed a foam that can destroy both chemical and biological agents and prevent them from spreading through the air. The foam has become available commercially in the last year, said Dr. Larry Bustard, a technical manager at Sandia.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said that the foam was used in the cleanup of mailrooms on Capitol Hill that were contaminated with anthrax. But subway officials are guarded about whether they have obtained it.

"One way that it could get deployed is in devices similar to fire extinguishers," Dr. Bustard said. "You could have a situation where a subway car or a train could be carrying some of these things."

Families Struggle to Get Funds
Charities face woes

By HEIDI EVANS
Daily News Staff Writer

ubert Hinds has never asked for anything in his life.

But now that his wife, Clara, a beloved seamstress at Windows on the World, has been buried, and with his savings virtually gone, the 57-year-old Far Rockaway man is about to enter the black hole of philanthropy.

When he steps into the white tent of the Family Assistance Center on the Hudson River and 55th St. tomorrow, Hinds will encounter a bewildering network with links to almost 200 charities and more than $1 billion donated to help families hurt by the Sept. 11 attack.


Hubert Hinds holds a picture of his wife, Clara, who was killed while working at Windows on the World.

"I was told there are lawyers down there to advise me on what can be done. I really don't know," said Hines. "You hear all the stories."

Nearly two months after the attack, with money still pouring in to charities large and small, there is no simple way for victims' families to apply for the full range of benefits and services available to them.

Relatives and friends of the grief-stricken go from one agency to another, sometimes spending morning and night at the pier or on the phone in an effort to get help. It is a bureaucratic nightmare for both the families and groups trying to do the right thing.

"It's a runaround. It's depressing. You start feeling that it's more of a handout," said Janet Collado, who has been trying to help her Spanish-speaking sister-in-law, Sandra Petrocino, get psychological and financial help as well as visas to allow her parents to come from the Dominican Republic to help take care of her and her two kids, Keyla, 10, and Alex, 5.

Central Register Eyed

Petrocino's husband, Manuel, a kitchen worker at Windows on the World, died in the Sept. 11 attack.

"The one question I hear from a lot of families is: "Where do I start? They always had that one person to lean on," said Collado.


	Sandra Petrocino, with children Alex and Kayla, mourn Manuel, also a Windows on the World employee.

While steps are being taken to organize this unprecedented charitable effort, the undertaking is immense. On Friday, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced that a group of major technology and consulting firms agreed to set up a centralized registry to keep track of giving and reduce duplication of services and fraud. The agencies, including the Red Cross and The Twin Towers Fund, will share access to a single database.

The idea is modeled on the one used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which kept tabs on each of the 168 families, what they needed and what they had been given. Each family also was assigned a caseworker to check on them several times a year and be their advocate.

But it will be at least another month before the database is up and working in New York, Spitzer said, leaving people to continue to go from place to place on their own.

In the meantime, there is growing pressure from donors to make sure the extraordinary amount of money collected is going to the families of an estimated 5,000 victims.

'Huge Dilemma'

"The public needs to understand that we are creating something out of nothing," said David Campbell, a vice president at the Community Service Society of New York, which is counseling the families of restaurant workers killed in the attack.

The 150-year-old society also is advising the trustees of the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund, which already has collected more than $2.1 million to benefit the 250 food service workers killed in the attack, including those who worked at Windows on the World.

"You can't create an accountable system overnight. It's a huge dilemma," Campbell said. "If you give it away too fast, you could give it to the wrong people. And if you delay, you run the risk of being seen as unresponsive. It's sort of a 'lose-lose' situation."

For the families of the 73 people who worked at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor, where dishwashers made as little as $8 an hour, there are particular hardships, as well as for the groups that want to help them.

Several of the kitchen workers were the sole source of support for their spouses, many of whom are undocumented. Many workers also left behind — and supported — children who live in other countries. These families are afraid to come forward, worried they will be hounded by immigration officials.

"It's a mess," said one charity official who asked not to be named.

More Than Just Money

Helping victims of the World Trade Center attack is not just about handing out money, some disaster experts say. And big relief organizations such as the Red Cross — which has collected an astounding $547 million for the World Trade Center families — will need to adapt to the unique set of circumstances.

Nancy Anthony, a key player in organizing the relief effort for Oklahoma City, said charitable groups will perform a greater service if they help people here plan for the next five years of their life, rather than getting them through just the next six months of paying bills.

"This is not like a flood or hurricane, where people need pots and pans and towels," said Anthony, referring to the typical Red Cross disaster. "In New York, like we had in Oklahoma City, you have incredible emotional devastation. People are going to have long-term mental health issues.

"When you look back, you don't want to say you did a good job because you handed out the money; a bank could have done that. It's because you helped people restore their lives, helped them to be independent, to be survivors and to go forward with their lives."

A New Battleground for an Old War: The Internet

By KELLY CROW

ld opponents — tenants and landlords — appear to have found new turf to dispute: cyberspace.

For more than a year, a tenant advocate organization has battled a real estate firm's claim to a name, TenantNet, and an Internet address, www.tenant.net. But last week, as the United States Patent and Trademark Office considered the issue, the firm abandoned plans for the site and called the argument a misunderstanding. No one called it a truce.

John Fisher, a computer consultant, said he created a Web site in 1994 for his online newsletter, which he called TenantNet. He later added news about housing court decisions and rent stabilization rules. These days, he said, about 4,000 people a day visit his site's 10,000 Web pages.

"When I started out as a tenant, I did not know where to turn for housing laws and information," Mr. Fisher said. "My site is well known for giving that. The problem was, I never registered the name."

This summer, neighbors told him they were unable to find his site. When they came to www.tenant.net, they found a blank page belonging to Julien J. Studley, one of the city's large real estate firms. Mr. Fisher called the company and learned it had begun proceedings to trademark the name and address as well as www.tenantnetwork .com and www.tenant net.com.

Mr. Fisher said he felt angry and foolish. "A trademark just didn't seem worth the trouble in the beginning," he said. He only told neighbors about the dispute last week when he learned that the federal trademark office was nearing a decision.

"I guess I relied on people's good faith," he added. "But I was scared because we need people to be able to find us. If we lost our name, we would lose a lot of our credibility.`

Alison Miller, a Studley spokeswoman, said her firm initially had no knowledge of Mr. Fisher's TenantNet; it just wanted to reserve the name and addresses for a possible Web site of property listings.

Last week, though, her office was flooded with faxes and letters from angry TenantNet users. Soon after, the firm withdrew the application, though she said the move had nothing to do with the outcry.

"We're simply abandoning a project that we've decided we don't need anymore," she said. "We realized we're happier with our internal listings database, so we've changed directions. Someone has made a big deal out of nothing."

Still, Mr. Fisher plans to trademark the name, and longtime TenantNet users are pleased.

"There are so few tenant groups with any recognition and power, so I'm very grateful they'll be around," said Elly Stone, 74, a voice teacher. "Anything that levels the playing field somewhat is a relief, even if it's just a name."

Uneasy Smokers Conjure Up Old Europe

By MICHELLE O'DONNELL

SIF CHEEMA had been a social smoker for a long time, lighting up at bars and clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, always throwing away his unfinished packs of Camel Lights when he left. But after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheema began smoking during the week, too. He started taking two and three smoking breaks a day at his Wall Street office. He craved cigarettes when he got home.

Mr. Cheema, an investment banker and an avid squash player, said smoking had eased his nerves since the terrorist attacks, and provided him with sidewalk outings where he could talk with colleagues.

"After I smoke," said Mr. Cheema, 29, speaking from his office a half-mile from ground zero, "I'm like, `Why did I do that?' I have to drink a lot of water afterwards. But the air is so bad here, it's probably worse than smoking, anyway."

For some New Yorkers, lighting up in the wake of Sept. 11 has been a gesture of defiance, a sort of devil-may-care attitude about future evils. For others, smoking is an old friend, a pacifier that adds equilibrium to these uncertain times. Whatever one's relationship is to cigarette smoking, there is little doubt among the city's tobacco counselors that New Yorkers are lighting up en masse in terrorism's wake.

The fear of terrorism grips the nation, but nowhere does it seem stronger than in New York, which suffered the worst on Sept. 11 and faces the continuing threat of anthrax. But try as New Yorkers might to use cigarettes to cope, the city's tough nonsmoking laws still force them to enjoy their furtive relief crowded into doorways and shivering at sidewalk cafes. At first glance, the sight of so many smokers outside may seem like a confirmation of the city's European pedigree, until one remembers why, exactly, New Yorkers are lighting up.

"Without a doubt, people are smoking more," said Jackie Storm, a nutritionist at New York Health and Racquet Club in Midtown. Ms. Storm had planned a group counseling session Tuesday night for a score of smokers. Only five people showed up.

It's impossible to count the New Yorkers who have turned, or returned, to cigarettes since Sept. 11. Many smokers are reluctant to admit to the habit in a city that, in recent years, has grown increasingly hostile to their smoke. Then there is the difficulty of reaching out to the smoker who is sick and tired of being reached out to.

"Who are you, and why are you talking to me?" one woman asked as she inhaled an unfiltered cigarette outside a Park Avenue office building last week. Another woman, halfway through a Winston 100, refused to give her name, even though she had been a smoker off and on for 30 years.

On Sept. 10, she had not had a puff for six weeks. On the morning of Sept. 11, she got off her train from Brooklyn, went up to her office and called her daughter, who worked at 5 World Trade Center. Once she found out that her daughter was safe, her next trip was around the corner to buy cigarettes. She was back to a pack a day, she said. But she could quit cold turkey again, she began to add, before a deep cough interrupted her.

Despite recent efforts to wipe out smoking in New York, the city has kept an image as a capital for smokers, in part because of its grittiness and noir mystique that feed into smoking's allure. With that appeal still there, tobacco counselors are bracing themselves for high rates of smoking recidivism in the city. "Whatever their drug of choice is, people are using it," Ms. Storm said. "If it's food, they're overeating. If it's nicotine, they're smoking."

Downtown, rescue workers at ground zero petitioned Philip Morris to donate cigarettes after days of the gruesome recovery work. A spokesman for the tobacco company said Philip Morris was prohibited from distributing free cigarettes according to the terms of the 1998 settlement it signed with 46 states. But tobacco counselors said they had heard that independent cigarette distributors gave the workers free cigarettes.

"We're trying to be sensitive to rescue workers, yet at the same time, we do know smoking kills," said Donna Shelley, a director with the Coalition for a Smoke-Free City. "Everyone has concerns about what unknown contaminants are in the dust at ground zero, yet we know all 200 carcinogenic chemicals that are in cigarettes."

At Engine 9 and Ladder 6 in Chinatown, at least six firefighters began smoking after Sept. 11. After lunch one day last week, firefighters sat around a table littered with cigarettes and other possible health hazards: pasta salad coated with room-temperature mayonnaise and a half-eaten cake topped with blue frosting. "I smoked lights before, but now I'm on Marlboro Reds," said one firefighter, Steve Gaudet.

"High octane," someone replied.

"Yeah, and next week I'll be on Pall Malls, no filter," Mr. Gaudet answered. "It just goes hand in hand with the drinking and the funerals."

From Bipartisan to All Partisan on Air Security

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

ASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — In the battle this week in the House over aviation security, the very survival of one group of businesses was at stake: the private security companies that employ screeners at airports around the country.

Seven companies would lose their contracts under a Senate-passed bill, which seeks to turn 28,000 baggage screeners into federal workers. To prevent that, the companies worked closely with House Republican leaders and eked out a victory on Thursday night, when the House approved a Republican bill that would allow the companies to stay in business but answer to the federal government instead of the airlines.

"We don't need to reinvent the wheel," said Kenneth Quinn, the Republican lobbyist who heads a new aviation security trade group.

Mr. Quinn spearheaded the rapid Washington education of these security companies, most of which are based in Europe and do not have a track record of using the traditional lobbying tactic on Capitol Hill — campaign contributions. The companies hired Mr. Quinn immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensing, rightly, that they would face criticism and insurance problems.

The lobbying was just one factor in the House vote to preserve the role of the private companies in keeping airports safe. Most of the credit went to President Bush and Representative Tom DeLay, the powerful majority whip. But in siding with the conservative wing of his party, some moderate Republicans say, Mr. Bush might have handed Democrats a potent campaign issue. [Page B7.]

The chief contribution by the private security company trade group, headed by Mr. Quinn, was to help frame the issue by suggesting that the House Republican leaders liken their plan to the European system of aviation security, which is widely respected.

Many European countries have established partnerships between the government and private security companies, often the same companies that conduct screening at American airports.

Public opinion had favored the Democratic plan to turn airport screeners into federal workers. But the White House and conservative Republicans they felt that needlessly expanded the size of government and tethered Mr. Bush to cumbersome regulations.

To defeat the Democratic plan, Mr. DeLay, along with other House leaders, devised a pressure and information campaign. President Bush's involvement, at the behest of House Republican leaders, was pivotal.

The effort was also bolstered in large part by other politicians and interest groups, including the Service Employees International Union, which represent 2,000 screeners, Boeing and the Fraternal Order of Police.

"This was the second hardest vote I've ever done," Mr. DeLay said in an interview. "Impeachment was the first."

In part, Mr. Bush was called upon to repair damage done by his own staff. On several occasions they had indicated that Mr. Bush would sign the Senate bill if he had to, no matter how flawed he considered it. That message undermined Republican efforts to win over many of their members, Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay recalled that at one meeting at the White House three weeks ago, a White House aide suggested that Mr. Bush had changed his position on aviation security.

The president, Mr. DeLay said, "looked at his staffer and said, `Who gave you the authority to change my position?' "

When Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush's chief of staff, repeated the pronouncement on Sunday on national television that Mr. Bush would sign the Senate bill, Mr. DeLay said he and the other leaders had to act quickly to curtail the damage.

"That really confused a lot of our members," Mr. DeLay said. "The key was for them to have meetings with the president, face to face, so he could outline what he wanted."

Undecided moderates at these meetings came away impressed. Representative Jack Quinn, a New York Republican, said Mr. Bush called him in his office on Thursday morning to chat. "What he said really got me thinking," said Mr. Quinn. "He said, `If you're going to to give me the responsibility to ensure the security of airlines, you have to give me the flexibility to do it right.' "

When Republican leaders still came up short of votes, they asked undecided lawmakers what they wanted, then they pulled out their pens and attended to their needs. A senior Congressional aide said one Democrat was promised a highway in his district. Another was promised a housing project.

But the most spectacular bargaining chip of all was tailored to New York Republicans: a broadly written provision that limits the liability of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owners of the World Trade Center, as well as private security companies, the insurance industry and just about every other entity associated with the terrorist attacks.

"We realized that we had to find something that was important to New York, and that was the limit on liability," Mr. DeLay said.

When New York Republicans asked to hear from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican leaders set that in motion. When they wanted to hear from Gov. George E. Pataki, Mr. DeLay said, they tracked Mr. Pataki down at a Yankees game on Wednesday night. When some New York Republicans wanted Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Pataki to put their support for the bill and the liability provision in writing, they received letters on Thursday morning.

Mr. DeLay said that the governor and the mayor "got us the entire New York delegation" of Republicans.

Now the terrain shifts to the negotiating table, where the House and Senate will try to come up with a compromise bill to send to Mr. Bush. Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, have both said they will fight hard to make all baggage screeners federal employees.

Both sides said they wanted the negotiations to move swiftly so that Americans could feel safe flying in airplanes. But the question has considerable political overtones, mostly because aviation safety strikes an emotional chord with people.

U.S. Sets Up Fund, Discourages Suits
By WILLIAM SHERMAN, Daily News Staff Writer

ttorney General John Ashcroft suggests victims of the Sept. 11 terror attack not sue for compensation and instead collect from a special fund established by the federal government, according to documents obtained by the Daily News.

The attorney general will make his comments in an advisory to be filed with Congress on Monday in preparation for setting up rules for how the unlimited fund will be operated.

Ashcroft's filing will invite public comment on the regulations guiding the fund, which will be administered by the Justice Department. Those rules must be in place by Dec. 21.

Language in the document includes the strong suggestion that victims' families apply to the fund rather than file wrongful death lawsuits, even though many key questions about the federal compensation program have yet to be worked out.

Survivors are prohibited from applying to the fund if they file suit against any party, including the airlines, the Port Authority, airport security companies and others.

"Litigation to obtain damages, particularly in a mass tort context, can be a lengthy, uncertain, and complex process, filled with substantial risk and expense," Ashcroft wrote.

"The purpose of this compensation program is to offer all potential claimants a more expeditious, predictable, and less complex alternative to that process," Ashcroft wrote.

The Justice Department must still work out a number of issues, including:

Whether accepting money from a charitable organization will be deducted from what a victim or survivor can receive from the federal fund.

Whether life insurance benefits would reduce the amount paid to survivors from the federal fund.

How each victim's worth is determined.

How each survivor's "pain and suffering" will be calculated — either in a uniform lump sum, or determined on a case-by-case basis.

Possible limits on fees for attorneys representing survivors in petitions to the fund also are under consideration, according to the department.

Fraud prevention methods are up for debate, as is the question of whether only those who died or were seriously injured in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are eligible for compensation.

The Justice Department advised that all comments should be submitted by e-mail to victimcomp.comments@usdoj.-gov, by fax to (301) 519-5956 or by mail to Kenneth Zwick, director, Office of Management Programs, Civil Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Main Building, Room 3140, 950 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20530.

Rescue workers at Trade Center site should see doctors, advocates say
By DONNA DE LA CRUZ
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK -- Firefighters and police officers who have worked at the World Trade Center site are being examined for respiratory and other health problems.

Some of the nearly 11,000 firefighters who have been at "ground zero" began undergoing medical screenings at FDNY headquarters last week. The tests include lung function exams, chest X-rays, hearing tests and blood work.

Police officers who had been at ground zero were eligible for free medical screenings at the Police Academy, said Joe Mancini, a spokesman for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.

Health and safety concerns were among the reasons cited by city officials this week when they ordered a cutback in the number of firefighters and cops working at the site. The decision led hundreds of angry firefighters to rally Friday in protest; a dozen were arrested.

Some rescue workers have complained about not being able to shake a persistent, annoying cough that has been dubbed "World Trade Center cough."

The fire department is concerned enough about firefighters' health that it distributed 7,000 respirators to protect them from airborne contaminants. The NYPD has not distributed respirators, but has given officers high-quality filter masks.

Health and environmental officials say toxic chemicals escaping from the rubble exceed federal safety standards, but there are no indications of any serious or long-term health risks.

Kathleen Callahan, deputy regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said workers at the site are adequately protected if they wear respirators.

Hundreds of firefighters and police have worked at the site since Sept. 11 in hopes of finding the remains of those killed.

"Some people may think this (disaster) is over, but it's not over to us. We're not getting on with our lives. We still have brothers who need to be brought home," said Will Hickey, of Ladder Company 105 in Brooklyn.

Hickey was among the firefighters who rallied Friday to protest the cutbacks in fire and police personnel searching for remains at ground zero. Earlier this week, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered that no more than 25 firefighters and 25 police officers be at ground zero at any one time.

There had been between 80 and 150 firefighters and cops working at the site around the clock.

The New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, a nonprofit advocacy group, has urged all rescue workers who worked prolonged periods at the trade center site to see a doctor immediately.

"Several police officers have already been diagnosed with occupational asthma and upper respiratory problems," said Joel Kupferman, director of the organization. "Rescue workers should definitely go see a doctor."

Parents Want Say On School Reopenings

By ALISON GENDAR, Daily News Staff Writer

anhattan parents aren't anxious for their children to return to evacuated schools near the World Trade Center, and they are demanding to have a say about when — and if — the remaining six schools are reopened.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, parents lobbied for students to be allowed to return to the eight schools that were evacuated.

But that desire has faded now that it's clear the Trade Center ruins could burn for months, and as Stuyvesant High School students complained of nosebleeds, sore throats and burning eyes after returning to school last month.

Angela Fremont-Appel, who has children at Stuyvesant and Intermediate School 89, said, "I was one of the Stuyvesant parents who said we had to get back to our school. We did. And now we have lots of kids who are sick, we have to deal with constant security checks and daily environmental testing.

"Now there's a whole different mindset on returning to schools: 'What's the hurry?'"

City and federal health officials have assured parents the air quality in lower Manhattan is safe. The Board of Education has pledged millions of dollars to clean the evacuated schools and conduct regular tests to monitor air quality. Tests from Stuyvesant have shown no dangerous toxins.

But as the board is set to regain control by Nov. 12 of another evacuated school — a building on Warren St. that houses Public School 89 and IS 89 — parents are questioning the wisdom of sending their children to schools so close to the destruction.

"The bottom line is that we do not want to be rushed," said Amie Gross, whose 7-year-old daughter, Renata, attends PS89. "There are environmental and emotional questions that have to be answered, and no one is going anywhere until they are."

PS/IS 89 will get the same asbestos testing and environmental cleaning as Stuyvesant and PS 234 on Chambers St., another evacuated school that has not yet reopened because it's in the restricted zone around the Trade Center.

PS 89 and PS 234 could reopen in early December, and PS150 on Greenwich St. soon after.

But Catie Marshall, a spokeswoman for Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, said the chancellor would coordinate with parents and staff to determine when the schools should reopen.

Plan Would Limit City's WTC Liability, by Kenneth R. Bazinet and Maki Becker

ayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki had a good reason to support a GOP version of the airline security bill: It had an eleventh-hour provision that would limit the city's liability in lawsuits resulting from recovery work at the World Trade Center site.

In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Giuliani said the clause "would protect the city by limiting the recovery of damages" as a result of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.

Pataki also wrote to the speaker, saying the clause "will free the City of New York and the Port Authority of undue burdens."

The clause is not included in a Senate version of the bill that passed, 100 to 0, three weeks ago. Democrats supported that version, but it failed by a four-vote margin last night.

The airline bill now goes to a conference committee, which will iron out differences in the Senate and House versions — including the liability issue.

"The city wants to be exempt from liability lawsuits from the cleanup, including workers who might contract lung cancer or anthrax while at the World Trade Center site," a congressional source said.

"It's still unclear how far-reaching the provision will be interpreted ... but it was something Republicans wanted in the bill," a second congressional source said.

Pros: Safe to Breathe Near WTC
By FRANK LOMBARDI
Daily News Staff Writer

battery of government experts testified yesterday that environmental conditions around the destroyed World Trade Center pose no long-term health risks.

The still-smoldering fires at the site continue to emit plumes of smoke and dust that can irritate the eyes, nose and throat. But they won't cause long-term health effects, they said.

The officials, appearing at a City Council hearing on the environmental impact of the Sept. 11 attack, said the air quality is safe based on federal standards for asbestos, fine particulates, lead, benzene, PCBs and other dangerous chemicals and substances.

"The vast majority of our tests find levels of these contaminants pose no significant long-term health risks to residents, business employees and visitors beyond Ground Zero," testified Kathleen Callahan, deputy regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

While some readings at the WTC site sometimes exceeded federal regulations, they were "snapshots of the levels of certain chemicals associated with burning," and changed with the weather and other conditions, Callahan said.

She added that the standards of the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration "are set many times below the level at which you would expect health impacts."

Callahan also said that workers at the site are adequately protected if they wear respirators.

Assurances also came from Dr. Jessica Leighton, assistant city health commissioner for environmental risk assessment. Pressed by Council Speaker Peter Vallone (D-Queens), who asked if "people are safe at the present level," Leighton said: "As far as the science has shown us right now, that is absolutely correct."

The assurances failed to satisfy several environmental advocates, including Joel Kupferman, executive director of the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project. He was dismissive of city and state environmental agencies and accused them of withholding some test results.

Workers and Residents Are Safe, Officials Say

By DIANE CARDWELL

nvironmental and health officials sought to assure a City Council committee yesterday that there were no indications of serious long-term health risks to workers or residents at or near ground zero, amid growing concerns to the contrary.

The committee heard from a panel of officials from the city, state and federal agencies monitoring the environmental impact of the attack on the World Trade Center and the cleanup. The officials, representing agencies like the city's health department, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, presented an intricate network of tests, standards and procedures that they said were intended to ensure the safety of those working at the site as well as those living and working in Lower Manhattan.

Robert Adams, the director of environmental health and safety services at the city's Department of Design and Construction, said that although workers at the site were still required to wear respirators and other protective gear, the data suggest that even an unprotected worker would not experience long-term health risks from the levels of poisons that had been detected.

Jessica Leighton, an assistant commissioner at the city's Department of Health, said that while tests had recorded occasional spikes in the levels of various contaminants, including asbestos, at some locations at or near the site, long-term health risks are associated with consistent exposure over a 30-year period.

In response to concerns that debris removal was recontaminating the area as tons are trucked out spewing dust, Mary Ellen Kris, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said that to strengthen enforcement of proper procedures, armed personnel would begin to ensure that the piles were watered and covered with tarp.

But the testimony appeared to do little to assuage the fears of representatives of the area, many of whom said that residents and workers were already sick with what was being called the "World Trade Center cough."

"I don't care if it's someone out there with a revolver, they're not going to shoot these 18-wheelers," said Councilwoman Kathryn E. Freed, who represents the area. "You need to look at a different way of doing it." Ms. Freed also said that there were firefighters who had worked at the site who were now exhibiting signs of emphysema.

Marc Ameruso, a member of the area's community board, said the issue went beyond whether the measured levels of certain contaminants stayed below the guidelines. "Just because it doesn't reach a certain level is really irrelevant when people are sick," he said.

After the hearing, Stanley E. Michels, the chairman of the Committee on Environmental Protection, said that the hearing had raised more questions than it answered and that he would hold another one in a week.

"With all the various tests and standards, they may be fine for things that have happened in the past, but we don't know if it applies here because the situation is so unique," he said. "We want to give them confidence, if the confidence is due. But the jury's still out on that."

When questioned about who would foot the bill for the cleanup, officials said that they would work with other agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency to figure it out. An official from the E.P.A. said that her agency had spent about $30 million so far.

Money was also the subject of another Council event yesterday. The City Council speaker, Peter F. Vallone, said he would travel to Washington to continue pushing for the $20 billion already appropriated for the region so that all of it would go to the city.

Mr. Vallone said that the city, which has already received $270 million to cover the cost of the cleanup, was depending on the money. Council officials estimated that without it, the city's projected budget deficits in each fiscal year after the current one would grow to nearly $4 billion.

While Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani agreed that the city deserved support because it had been the target of an attack, he dismissed Mr. Vallone's concerns about receiving federal money. "At this point, New York has gotten everything we asked for from the federal government," the mayor said, adding that the federal support the city had received in the wake of the attack had been the strongest in the city's history.

"I don't think we should start that political thing yet," he continued. "We should at least have the good grace to wait a little before we start all that political bad-mouthing and tin cup stuff."

Fire May Smolder for Months

By GREG GITTRICH
Daily News Staff Writer

irders of red-hot steel driven as many as six stories below ground by the collapse of the World Trade Center are fueling an underground blaze that threatens to smolder and cough up smoke for months.


	Firefighters hose down rubble at Ground Zero yesterday.

The unprecedented structural fire does not have enough oxygen to rapidly devour its enormous fuel supply — desks, carpets, computers, paper, cars and other combustible material contained in and under the 110-story twin towers, experts say.

"So what you've got is a smoldering situation," said George Miller, president of the National Association of State Fire Marshals. "Judging from my 32 years of experience, this could burn for a long time."

Exactly how long "a long time" is, no one knows for sure. But fire engineers and safety experts told the Daily News that the blaze likely will continue burning for months — until most of the 1.2 million tons of debris are hauled away.

A fire needs three things to survive: fuel, oxygen and a heat source.

"If you can break that formula in any way, it will go out," said Marko Bourne, a spokesman for the fire administration of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "The problem is how to do that with this fire."

While the blaze is starved for oxygen, the scalding steel buried below ground will retain its heat until enough air reaches it or water douses it, said Don Carson, a hazardous materials expert for the National Operating Engineers Union.

The jets that exploded into the towers showered them with gallons of jet fuel and raised the temperature of the structural beams to about 2,000 degrees.

"There are pieces of steel being pulled out that are still cherry red," Carson said as he stood amid the smoking debris this week. "It's like the charcoal that you put in your grill. ... You light it and it stays hot."

Firefighters continue to soak the ravaged 17-acre area with water, but the heavy streams seep only so far into the layered debris.

As chunks of steel and concrete are raised by excavation machines, the city's Bravest wet the exposed areas and extinguish flames that erupt from crevices when oxygen rushes in.

"We will put it out," said a Bronx firefighter. "It's just a matter of time."

The Fire Department has yet to declare the blaze under control.

No Blaze Like It

Bourne said the blaze is so "far beyond a normal fire" that it is nearly impossible to draw conclusions about it based on other fires. While it is not unusual for underground fires to smolder for long periods of time, these usually occur in landfills or coal mines.

Several mines in Pennsylvania and Canada have been burning for decades. The classic example cited by experts is a strip mine in Centralia, Pa., that ignited in 1962 and continues to burn.

Forest fires also can rage for months. But Don Smurthwaite of the National Interagency Fire Center said not to come to him for answers to the Ground Zero blaze.

"We can always count on that season-ending event — rain or snow — to take care of the fire," Smurthwaite said. "The fires in the World Trade Center are entirely different. All the fuel they need is right there."

Parents Call Excavation Barge A Health Threat
By ELIZABETH HAYS
Daily News Staff Writer

arents from several lower Manhattan schools are fighting to have a barge stocked with World Trade Center debris removed from its berth in the Hudson River.


	Truck prepares to dump debris that will be loaded onto barge docked off West St. near Ground Zero.

The group fears the barge, docked off West St. behind Stuyvesant High School, is coating the neighborhood with potentially toxic dust.

The barge is a central link in the city's massive excavation of the disaster site. Each day, up to 350 trucks loaded with steel and other debris rumble six blocks from Ground Zero to the 250-foot barge at Pier 25, just north of Chambers St.

The debris is then loaded onto smaller barges and shipped to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island or to metal recyclers in New Jersey.

Despite assurances from city and federal officials that the air is safe, parents from four of the schools closest to the wreckage say that the trucks track dust through the neighborhood and spew clouds into the air when they dump their loads.

"We want the barge moved," said Angela Fremont-Appel, co-chairwoman of the Parent Teacher Association at Intermediate School 89, which shares a building with Public School 89 on Warren and West Sts.

"We all feel the environmental conditions down there aren't healthy for students, for families living down there or for staff."

The other school involved is Public School 234 on Chambers and Greenwich Sts.

Of the four schools, Stuyvesant is the only one that is back in its building.

Workers at the wreckage have complained of persistent coughs and other ailments. Students and staff at Stuyvesant complained of coughs, headaches, nosebleeds and other ailments after classes resumed on Oct. 9. This week, about 30 students interviewed said their symptoms had eased.

Frank McCarton, a spokesman for the city Office of Emergency Management, said it was unlikely the barge would be moved.

He said the city is testing continuously testing air quality and taking steps to ensure the amount of dust is minimized, such as spraying the debris with water.

"Safety is paramount for everybody in that area," he said.

Parents of students from the three displaced schools warned that they may refuse to send their children back to the schools if the barge stays.

"We don't want to draw a line in the sand about the barge," said George Olsen, president of PS 234's PTA.

"But until we know that it's safe, we're not going back."

Citing Safety, City Will Cut Work Force for Recovery

By ROBERT WORTH

ity officials have ordered the Police and Fire Departments to reduce the number of officers and firefighters recovering remains at ground zero, a decision announced amid new concerns about polluted air at the site.

The number will be dropped to 24 officers and 24 firefighters at any one time, spokesmen for the Uniformed Firefighters Association said.

From 60 to 80 police officers and firefighters have been digging through the twisted metal and rubble in search of bodies.

The decision, which was reported yesterday in The Daily News, provoked angry protests from members of the police and firefighters unions.

"We were promised by the mayor and the fire commissioner that we wouldn't give this up until we got everybody out," said Michael Carter, the vice president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association. "To scale back to 24 people, that's to say that this has become nothing more than a construction site."

Mr. Carter added that the bodies of 250 firefighters remain buried at the site, and that recovery operations continue to find bodies virtually every day.

At a press briefing yesterday, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that "all of the changes being made at ground zero are being made for safety reasons."

So far the city has been lucky that only two people have been seriously injured while working at the site, the mayor added.

At least 4,000 firefighters who have worked at the site are being treated for persistent chest pain and coughing. It is not yet clear how serious the condition, dubbed World Trade Center cough, will be.

The mayor conceded that pulling firefighters off the site "may require a certain amount of discipline." He added, "If the safety experts can be convinced that we can make exceptions to it, then I'll make the exceptions in a second."

But Thomas Manley, the health and safety officer for the firefighters union, said that safety was not the real reason for scaling back the operations. He said that the mayor wanted to minimize the site to bring business back to the area.

"As long as we're wearing respirators, we don't have a health and safety problem," he said. "I don't want to be going to Fresh Kills to dig out my members. That's not what I'd call respect."