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Public was never told that dust from ruins is dangerously caustic

The Environmental Protection Agency has strapped air monitors on light poles on almost every block of lower Manhattan to measure contaminants from the collapse of the World Trade Center. Kevin Manning/P-D

NEW YORK - Even as the dust from the collapsed World Trade Center was still settling, top government scientists were determining that the smoky gray mixture was highly corrosive and potentially a serious danger to health.

The U.S. Geological Survey team found that some of the dust was as caustic as liquid drain cleaner and alerted all government agencies involved in the emergency response. But many of those on the front lines of protecting the health of the public and workers cleaning up the site say they never got the information.

"I'm supposed to be in the loop, and I've never heard any specific numbers on how caustic the dust actually was," said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. "There is a large segment of the population here whose physicians needed to know that information that USGS submitted. Exposure to dust with a high pH could impact everyone, but especially the very young, the very old and those with existing pulmonary disease." Census data show large concentrations of young and elderly living near the World Trade Center site.

The EPA's office in New York said it repeatedly told the public that the dust was caustic because of the cement that was pulverized when the towers collapsed. But an examination of all the EPA's public and press statements made since Sept. 11 found nothing that warned of the very high pH levels found by the Geological Survey scientists. Nor did the statements disclose the specific levels that the EPA's own testing found.

"We've not heard of EPA or anyone else releasing information on specific pH levels in the dust, and that's information that we all should have had," said Carrie Loewenherz, an industrial hygienist for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides assistance to more than 250 unions.

"It's the specific numbers -- those precise pH levels -- that we need to make the appropriate safety decisions for the workers, and they were never released," Loewenherz said. "The dust, once it's in contact with moist tissue, the throat, the mouth, nasal passages, the eyes and even sweaty skin, it becomes corrosive and can cause severe burns."

Most of the samples taken by USGS' team had a pH of 9.5 to 10.5, about the same alkalinity as ammonia. Two samples that were taken inside a high-rise apartment and in a gymnasium across from the wreckage of the World Trade Center had a pH of 11.8 to 12.1 -- equivalent to what would be found in liquid drain cleaner.

The degree of acidity or alkalinity in a material is expressed as a pH measurement. Neutral pH -- like water -- is 7 on a 15-point scale. Lower than 7, to 0, is an indication of acid. Higher than 7, to 14, the top of the scale, is alkaline. Levels near either end of the pH scale can harm the health of people and animals.

Bruce Lippy, Loewenherz's counterpart with the operating engineers union, is responsible for the 300 workers running heavy equipment at ground zero.

"Part of the dilemma we faced was not knowing precisely what was in the dust," Lippy said. "We knew it was caustic but had no information on exactly how caustic it was. I was trying to get people to wear the respirators, but if I knew how high the pH levels were, I could have been more persuasive in convincing the workers of the dangers."

Only a handful of the 100 or so workers sorting wreckage and loading trucks on the site over three days last week were seen wearing respirators or protective masks.

Scientists rush to Manhattan

Like the rest of the world, the USGS team watched the storm of dust roll across Manhattan after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11. With its world-class laboratories and sensors that can detect minerals on a distant planet, the Denver-based team was already making arrangements to get NASA's infrared sensors and aircraft over ground zero as the EPA and the U.S. Public Health Service requested its help.

Responding to requests from the White House science office, the NASA team flew over Manhattan four times between Sept. 16 and Sept. 23, while USGS scientists collected samples of the dust from 35 locations below.

Back in Denver, more than two dozen scientists using the world's most sophisticated analytical equipment ran the samples through extensive testing.

The Geological Survey's test results were posted Sept. 27 on a Web site restricted to government agencies.

The USGS findings were "evaluated by our technical experts and found to be consistent with the findings of EPA's Office of Research and Development," said Bonnie Bellow, the agency's spokeswoman in New York.

"The USGS data was also discussed by an interagency group of scientists, epidemiologists and health officials," Bellow said.

But neither the EPA headquarters nor its New York office would comment on what came out of these discussions or which EPA results they were "consistent" with.

The USGS data on pH levels were not released by the EPA, nor apparently were the environmental agency's own test results on the dust.

"It is extremely distressing to learn that the EPA knew how caustic samples of the dust were and didn't publicize the information immediately, or make sure that OSHA publicized it," said Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

"If we had known at the time exactly how caustic the dust could be, we would have been in a better position to make informed decisions about respiratory protection to recommend and about the urgency of ensuring that workers and residents followed those recommendations," Shufro said.

"It is inexcusable for EPA to have kept silent for so long about such a potential hazard."

Dust weakens strapping youth

John Healy Jr. is 15, big, taller than his father. He looks as strong as a bull. But when he talks, wheezes and deep coughs punctuate his words. He and his father, John, live in an apartment overlooking what was the World Trade Center.

"Something is tearing him up, hitting his lungs hard," said his father. "He had asthma when he was younger, but he was fine until after Sept. 11. If I knew the dust was that caustic, there's no way I would have brought him back here."

John goes to Stuyvesant High School, a 10-story building for the brightest of the bright. It's one block from the collapsed buildings and beside the Hudson River, where barges are being filled with debris destined for sorting at the Fresh Kills landfill.

"I need to go to this school, and I need to live here to do it, but something in that dust is just hurting me," the teen said as he looked down at the pile of pills, throat sprays and inhalers in his two large hands.

His father looked out the narrow dining room window at the brightly lighted carnage bellow. A light film of dust coated the window.

"I can't understand why the government didn't tell us what was actually in the dust," Healy said. "Were they afraid we were going to panic? I needed that information to decide what was best for my son. I needed it."

The teen's malady and other serious problems are being seen by physicians throughout New York.

"What we're finding is incredible irritation to the lungs, throat and nasal passages," said Herbert, from Mount Sinai. "Some of the tissue is cherry red, vivid, bright, and we've never seen anything like it before.

"There are a large number of clinicians and public health specialists who are struggling to reconcile the health problems they're seeing with the exposure data they're being given," Herbert said. "The high pH in the dust may be a part of the answer. If the government had these pH readings of 11 and 12, the public and their physicians should have been told.

"Any credible information the government had relating to health issues just should have been released," she said. "There is no justification for holding it. You don't conceal the information from those who need it."

A dubious honor

Mark Rushing and Tori Bunch have the debatable honor of having lived in one of the sites that USGS tested. In fact, their apartment on the 30th floor of a building overlooking the World Trade Center tied for highest pH -- 12.1 -- of the dozens of sites where samples were collected.

"It's obvious to those of us living here that the government -- city, state and federal -- wanted things to return to normal as quickly as possible. The economic losses were great," Rushing said. "But no matter how you view it, that's no excuse for the government, any government, to conceal hazards from the people they are charged with protecting."

Rushing and Bunch found a new apartment as far from the World Trade Center as they could get and still be in the city. The apartment is on the lowest floor available.

Even within the EPA, professionals believe the agency did a disservice by not acknowledging and releasing the Geological Survey's data.

Cate Jenkins, a senior environmental scientist in the hazardous materials division at the EPA headquarters, said: "The pH levels the USGS documented were far too high for EPA to ignore. They insisted that all the information regarding health and safety was being released to the public. Well, that's not true. There's nothing, internally or in public releases, that shows the agency ever disclosed specific pH levels."

On Thursday, the EPA's Bellow told the Post-Dispatch: "We have no specific data on pH levels." Bellow added, "This is all the available information on the subject."

Late Friday, the EPA responded to the question of why it didn't collect its own pH numbers.

"EPA had enough information about the alkalinity of the material from the World Trade Center without doing further analysis," Bellow said.

The question of why the EPA didn't release the data it had remains unanswered.

The EPA is in a no-win situation. No government agency had been prepared for the enormity of the terrorist attack on New York. Tight budgets -- federal, state and city -- ruled out planning and drills for an unfathomable event of this size.

Even most critics say that no amount of preparation could have kept the workers fleeing the twin towers -- and the rescue workers racing to save them -- from sucking in lungfuls of toxic dust and smoke.

But it's what the EPA and OSHA and the New York state and city health departments did after the dust settled and the smoke cleared that has generated the most criticism.

On Monday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who represents the people in lower Manhattan, is holding a congressional hearing to determine who dropped the ball. He is expected to announce that legislation will be introduced to "force EPA to do the proper testing inside offices and apartments and release the finding in a form that would be of value to the public and their physicians."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., has scheduled a Senate investigation of the issue.

Less than a week after the attack, on Sept. 16, EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman told New Yorkers: "There's no need for the general public to be concerned."

That was the same day that USGS and NASA flew their first sampling missions over the city.

The EPA said its boss's comments that there were no dangers from dioxin, benzene, PCB or asbestos -- all cancer-causing agents -- were based on thousands of outside air samples. Last month, the Post-Dispatch reported that high levels of asbestos were found in many apartments and offices. The EPA said its regulations did not call for indoor testing.

Hundreds of firefighters, paramedics and police officers are sick, suffering what some physicians call "ground zero coughs." Their problems may have come from unprotected exposure the first week of the attack.

But hundreds of other people -- workers, students and residents -- who fled the area and stayed out for weeks and then came back also are suffering major respiratory problems.

The few Christmas decorations that adorned light poles in lower Manhattan have been removed. But the metal poles still bristle with air monitors and vacuum pumps sucking in air almost around the clock, searching for asbestos fibers, chemicals and traces of heavy, toxic metals.

For the most part, the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration say they're finding little, if anything, for New Yorkers to worry about.

They are talking about contaminants in the air, which is the main pathway for toxic materials to enter the body.

But the EPA pays little or no attention to indoor contamination.

Late Friday, the New York City health department issued a brief statement, with very few details, about both indoor and outdoor testing done by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. This well-respected research arm for the Department of Health and Human Services, found pulverized fiberglass in almost half of the samples it examined. However, New York health officials released no specifics on the levels of toxic material found, and no one could be reached for comment.

Attention is being paid to keeping the contamination on the site. Trucks hauling debris from ground zero pass through an EPA drive-through shower before they reach the streets. City street sweepers and washers drive a seemingly endless circle up and down the streets of lower Manhattan.

But even blocks from the collapse, massive windows on offices and cornices on many apartment buildings are still caked with dust.

"We made this analytical effort because we were concerned about the likelihood that the composition of the dust could be potentially harmful to the rescue and cleanup workers at the site and to people living and working in lower Manhattan," said USGS team member Geoffrey Plumlee, a geochemist who determined the pH levels.

"We shared our findings with EPA, FEMA, the federal emergency response coordinator and everyone else we felt was appropriate. We anticipated that the results would have been shared with the people on the ground, those at risk, but it looks like the information never got to those who needed it."

SPECIAL REPORT \DANGER FROM GROUND ZERO \Reporter Andrew Schneider: 
E-mail: aschneider@post-dispatch.com \
Phone: 314-340-8101 \
Photographer Kevin Manning \
E-mail: kmanning@post-dispatch.com \
Phone: 314-340-8277

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Roiling dust cloud filled USGS scientists with a sense of urgency

By Andrew Schneider
Of The Post-Dispatch
c2002, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
DENVER - Two dozen men and women dropped everything, determined to find out what was in that residue -- and how dangerous it was.

Chemists, geophysicists, astrophysicists and other scientists cloistered in the sprawling U.S. Geological Survey complex here are not emergency responders. Their work is detailed, methodical, with little room for haste or need for spontaneity. They track water poisoned by mining, search for cracks in the Earth's crust, and explore for minerals on Mars and Saturn.

But when a terrorist attack leveled the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, that all changed.

"We sat at home, watched that gray-white cloud roll over lower Manhattan, and knew damned well that the dust was going to hurt a lot of people," said Gregg Swayze, a USGS geophysicist. "I knew we had the best technology in the world to determine precisely what was in that dust."

For more than a month, about two dozen men and women shelved their ongoing projects and found themselves worried about fighter intercepts and White House demands and people they didn't know. Many worked 18-hour days, speeded up normally slow-moving science and used the most sophisticated analytical equipment to help the people of New York.

Part of that technology was a remote-sensing unit designed for use in exploring planets, called Airborne Visible Infrared Spectrometer. AVIRIS, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, reads the infrared signatures of minerals reflected from the ground into its sensors. Then, they are compared with the unique peaks and curves -- similar to a fingerprint -- of the signatures of thousands of minerals and materials in the Geological Survey's vast database.

When used by NASA, the device is often strapped inside a modified U-2 plane that flies 12.5 miles above the Earth's surface. But when the USGS team uses AVIRIS, it's most often poking through a hole in the belly of a de Havilland Twin Otter prop plane.

On Sept. 11, the twin-engine aircraft was on a science mission along the East Coast before it was grounded in Atlanta, ordered to land like every other aircraft that morning.

"We needed to get that aircraft up and over New York if we were going to accomplish anything," said Roger Clark, the astrophysicist who heads USGS' portion of the AVIRIS program in Denver.

But first they needed approval from NASA, which owned the plane, the AVIRIS and the crews that operate it.

Step 1: Avoid getting shot down

On Sept. 12, Clark contacted his counterpart, Robert Green, who heads the AVIRIS program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

By Sept. 13, Green had permission from NASA to fly the mission. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy had signed off on the flight. And the Air Force had agreed not to shoot the Twin Otter down.

With permission granted, Clark's team had to determine exactly how many passes over Manhattan would be needed to survey the spread of the dust.

Swayze rushed three blocks to building 810, the USGS store in Denver. He grabbed the four topographic maps of Manhattan and spent the next two hours with pencil and ruler precisely plotting how many flights would be needed to cover the disaster area and surrounding apartments and offices.

"We knew the age of the World Trade buildings and that it likely was built with much asbestos-containing material in the concrete, the floor tiles, the fireproofing and walls," said Clark, who is a member of the team running NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and the Cassini flight to Saturn. "We wanted to see how far the dust had spread."

Airborne at high noon

As they prepared for the flight, the Denver team determined that 14 passes would be needed, going from Central Park to Jersey City, N.J., to cover lower Manhattan.

The longitude and latitude of each starting and ending point was e-mailed to NASA pilots Bill Clark and John Longenecker. In the cabin of the Otter, Betina Pavri and Charles Sarture had fine-tuned AVIRIS and had prepared the vessels of liquid nitrogen needed to cool its infrared detectors.

On Sept. 16, around noon when the sun was highest, lighting as much of the dark canyons between the buildings as possible, the first of the USGS missions was flown. The first pass was at 6,500 feet above Manhattan; the second pass at an altitude of 12,500 feet. The data tapes were loaded on a FEMA jet and flown to the Jet Propulsion Lab at Pasadena. They arrived at 2 a.m., where Green and Frank Loiza were waiting.

The first evaluation of the data on Sept. 17 cut through the heavy smoke and clearly showed 34 fires burning deep in the bowels of the collapsed World Trade Center complex. That was more than anyone had anticipated.

Maps were prepared and shipped to emergency response teams in New York. Based on this information, firefighters redeployed their equipment and changed how they were attacking the fires, which AVIRIS measured at heat ranging between 800 degrees and 1,000 degrees.

"Everything we were finding went through the White House first," Clark said.

Collecting dust on the ground

For AVIRIS' data to be most useful, measurements for calibration must be taken on the ground under the flight path.

So Swayze and Todd Hoefen, another USGS geophysicist, flew to New York on Sept. 17. Their backpacks filled with respirators, protective clothing, dozens of sampling bags and a hand-held version of AVIRIS -- something like a Star Trek tricorder -- they set out to get the calibration data. Somehow, they said, they got through airport security without a second glance.

For three days, they took calibration sightings during the day and at night. Taking the ferry across the Hudson from New Jersey, they collected samples of dust in zipper-lock freezer bags from window ledges, flower pots, car windshields -- anyplace it was collecting. They hoofed it out two miles -- or to the river's edge -- in each direction of the compass from the collapsed towers and gathered three dozen samples.

They found an all-night Kinko's and shipped the special calibrations back to Denver over the Internet.

Worried that a rainstorm the night of Sept. 14 might have altered the dust, Swayze and Hoefen found dry samples -- dust from an apartment on the 30th floor about three blocks from the World Trade Center and a gymnasium in the World Financial Center across from the smoldering ruins.

Finding and analyzing the dry dust was crucial, the scientists said, because it presented an accurate picture of what risks workers and residents would face if they encountered dust that hadn't been rained upon or splashed with wash water. "AVIRIS offers a bird's-eye view -- coarse and broad," Clark said. "The ground samples that Gregg and Todd collected gave us up-close, specific information on specific points."

But the mission wasn't over.

The White House science office asked that AVIRIS be flown again because more information was needed, Green said. On Sept. 18, 22 and 23, the Twin Otter and its $15 million-plus sensor crisscrossed Manhattan.

Inside the USGS anthill

By the afternoon of Sept. 20, the ground samples were back in Denver, being split among the different laboratories that dotted the rat's maze of hallways.

"The place looked like an anthill that someone kicked," said Gregory Meeker, head of the agency's mircobeam laboratory. "Everyone was grabbing their samples and running."

Clark, Swayze, Hoefen and Eric Livo were in the Imaging Spectroscopy Lab. Meeker was running the scanning electron microscope and doing energy dispersive spectroscopy. Steve Sutley was conducting X-ray diffraction on his sample of dust. Joe Taggart was doing X-ray fluorescence. And Geoffrey Plumlee and Phil Hageman were doing chemical analysis and chemical leach testing.

Sam Vance, an environmental scientist with the EPA who is liaison to the Geological Survey, was notifying his agency, New York health officials and the U.S. Public Health Service of the preliminary results of tests and what his colleagues were doing next.

"All of these techniques are used to define the composition of the dust, and we were looking at 40 different minerals," Swayze said. "They each back each other up. Some techniques can see more than others, and we were throwing in every technique we had in house."

Clark said: "We didn't know what we were going to find. We've never had a pulverized World Trade Center to analyze before."

Within hours, some results started coming back. They did find the asbestos they were searching for. But they also found an alphabet soup of heavy metals.

But the real surprise was the pH of the dust. It registered a high of 12.1 on the samples taken indoors. Ammonia has a pH of 10.

The degree of acidity or alkalinity in a material is expressed as a pH measurement. Neutral pH -- like water -- is 7 on a 15-point scale. From less than 7 to zero is an indication of acid. From higher than 7 to 14, the top of the scale, is alkaline. Levels near either end of the pH scale can harm health.

Plumlee was mixing one part of dust to 20 parts of water.

"We simulated the rain mixing with the dust, which gives an idea of what the dust will do when it contacts tissue that is consistently moist like lungs, throat, eyes and such," the geochemist said.

"We were startled at the pH level we were finding," he added. "We knew that the cement dust was caustic, but we were getting pH readings of 12 and higher. It was obvious that precautions had to be taken to protect the workers and people returning to their homes from the dust." Significant efforts are being made at ground zero to keep the work area wet, to suppress the dust, but this has minimal effect on the hazards of pockets of dust just below the surface. Environmental cleanup specialists say that large amounts of water, a week or two of heavy rain, are needed to neutralize the high pH.

Bringing in the health experts

While the USGS team is considered the world's leading authority in mineral composition, its members are not health experts. They took their findings to toxicologists and emergency coordinators from the EPA and physicians from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control.

These medical authorities agreed that the Geological Survey's findings, especially the high pH levels, must be available to those setting rules for worker safety and those considering whether and when to permit people to return to their homes and offices, the scientists said.

All scientific reports go through a cumbersome and extensive peer review. The USGS team broke all records and had their findings reviewed and on a "government-only" Web site within a week.

"It was important to get the information out to those who needed it," Clark said. "What we wanted to indicate to emergency response workers and those making decisions about people returning to their homes and offices was that in addition to the high pH, there were heavy metals, especially chromium and aluminum, in the dust which could be released by water."

On Sept. 27, the information was e-mailed to all the government contacts the team had.

"Then it was sent to EPA, FEMA, OSHA and everyone else that seemed to be in charge," Clark said. "It was just obvious that people needed to know what was in that dust."

But even today, most New Yorkers have never been told what the USGS team found in the dust.