EPA Covered Up Deadly Ground Zero Air Problems

Monitor Wire Services

The World Trade Center Health Registry seeks to contact everyone who had contact to pollutants during and after the terrorist attack

The conditions were "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in immediately adjacent buildings, says a new study by air quality experts.

The study's lead author, Thomas Cahill, a UC Davis professor emeritus of physics and atmospheric science and research professor in engineering, said "Now that we have a model of how the debris pile worked, it gives us a much better idea of what the people working on and near the pile were actually breathing.

"Our first report was based on particles that we collected one mile away. This report gives a reasonable estimate of what type of pollutants were actually present at Ground Zero.

"The debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together the components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least six weeks."

Cahill, an international authority on the constituents and transport of airborne particles, says the study backs up conclusions by the EPA's own Inspector General, who last month revealed that the Bush White House pressured the Agency to not warn the public and issue good- news- only reports.

"Christie Whitman was too premature to say it was safe," Cahill told the SF Chronicle on Tuesday. "I think the EPA should have known. The EPA had its own reports saying it could be dangerous. Why didn't the EPA bring in their own people from all over the country? They could have. Never thought of it. They did later. But not in the time that mattered."

The new work helps explain the very fine particles and extraordinarily high concentrations found by an earlier UC Davis study, the first to identify very fine metallic aerosols in unprecedented amounts from Ground Zero. It will be essential to understanding the growing record of health problems.

Cahill heads the UC Davis DELTA Group (for Detection and Evaluation of Long-range Transport of Aerosols), a collaborative association of scientists at several universities and national laboratories. The DELTA Group has made detailed studies of small airborne particles, called aerosols, from the trade-center collapse, 1991 Gulf War oil fires, volcanic eruptions and global dust storms, and has most recently finished a massive 21-site study of Asian aerosols for the National Science Foundation.

The new study reinforces and extends conclusions that DELTA Group reached in February 2002 in what is still the most extensive analysis of the dust and smoke from the hot collapse piles after the trade center collapse.

In the 2002 report, DELTA researchers described their analysis of over 8,000 air samples collected Oct. 2-30, 2001, on a rooftop at 201 Varick St., one mile north-northeast of the trade center complex.

They detailed very high levels of very fine airborne particles -- particles that pre-Sept. 11 EPA summaries had showed could raise a person's risk of lung damage and heart attacks. Now the researchers have added analyses of samples collected through May 2002, and constructed a timeline with physical and chemical explanations for the results.

The new study also confirms, Cahill said, that the very fine particles observed were almost totally from the trade center debris pile and not from other upwind sources, such as power plants and the diesel trucks used to haul away the debris.

When the trade center towers burned and collapsed, tons of concrete, glass, furniture, carpets, insulation, computers and paper were reduced to enormous, oxygen-poor debris piles that slowly burned until Dec. 19, 2001.

In that hot pile, some of the debris' constituent elements combined with organic matter and abundant chlorine from papers and plastics, and then escaped to the surface as metal-rich gases. These then either burned or chemically decomposed into very fine particles capable of penetrating deeply into human lungs.

In the trade-center air samples, Cahill identified four classes of particles that have been named by the EPA as likely to harm human health:

• Fine and very fine transition metals, which interfere with lung chemistry.

• Acids, in this case sulfuric acid, which attack cilia and lung cells directly.

• Very fine, un-dissolvable (insoluble) particles, in this case glass, which travel through the lungs to the bloodstream and heart.

• High-temperature organic matter, many components of which are known to be carcinogens.

"For each of these four classes of pollutant, we recorded the highest levels we have ever seen in over 7,000 measurements we have made of very fine air pollution throughout the world, including Kuwait and China," Cahill said.

After the debris fire was out, pollution levels dropped, Cahill said. DELTA Group measurements at the trade-center site made in May 2002, with the American Lung Association of New York, showed that levels of almost all of the very fine components had declined more than 90 percent.