Did the EPA really cover up New York's 9/11 air pollution?

Clearing the Air
Did the EPA really cover up New York's 9/11 air pollution?
by Duncan Currie
07/16/2007, Volume 012, Issue 41



Of former Bush officials, Christine Todd Whitman would seem to be the most difficult to cast as a White House puppet. During her tenure as Environmental Protection Agency director from 2001 to 2003, Whitman looked askance at the Bush line on global warming. It became clear early on, says one ex-administration official, that there were "Whitman people" at EPA who repeatedly sparred with "Bush people" elsewhere in the administration.

Yet the former New Jersey governor, a famously moderate-to-liberal Republican, faced a rabid grilling the week before last by House Democrats, who believe the government lied about post-9/11 air quality in Lower Manhattan in order to expedite the reopening of Wall Street. Growing visibly angry at times, and sighing resignedly at others, Whitman denied the allegations, which gained currency among Democrats after an August 2003 report by the EPA inspector general on the agency's response to the World Trade Center collapse.

The June 25 hearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Jerrold Nadler began without a single GOP member present (a few eventually showed up). A New York Democrat whose district includes Ground Zero, Nadler decried the "reckless disregard" of those federal officials who, according to Nadler, deliberately downplayed the risks to first responders digging through the World Trade Center rubble and to those living and working around the financial district.

"Our government knowingly exposed thousands of American citizens unnecessarily to deadly hazardous materials, and because it has never admitted the truth, Americans remain at grave risk to this day," Nadler said. "Thousands of first responders, residents, area workers, and students are sick, and some are dead--and that toll will continue to grow until we get the truth and take appropriate action."

As proof of this malevolent conspiracy, Nadler and other Democrats pointed to the August 2003 EPA inspector general's report, which concluded that Whitman "did not have sufficient data and analyses" to declare the air in Lower Manhattan "safe to breathe" on September 18, 2001, as she did. "At that time," said the inspector general, "air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones." But the report continued: "Because of numerous uncertainties--including the extent of the public's exposure and a lack of health-based benchmarks--a definitive answer to whether the air was safe to breathe may not be settled for years to come."

In other words, the science was murky at the time and remained so two years later. In a September 2003 interview with NBC reporter Lisa Myers, then-EPA inspector general Nikki Tinsley was asked whether she had "any evidence that the public was harmed by reassurances that air-quality levels were safe." Tinsley responded, "No, we don't have any evidence of that."

Democrats also highlighted the testimony of former EPA communications official Tina Kreisher, who told the inspector general that she "felt extreme pressure" over the press releases from Samuel Thernstrom of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

After 9/11, the White House established a "single point of contact" system to aid with crisis management and ensure that agencies such as EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the National Security Council were on the same page. Thernstrom became the press "point of contact" for all EPA news releases, sending those releases to the National Security Council for endorsement. He and Kreisher did squabble over procedural matters--which even led to "screaming telephone calls" (as had also happened before 9/11). Kreisher apparently felt pressured to obey the proper chain of command. But did Thernstrom's edits of EPA press releases amount to a conscious falsification of the science?

Not according to Kreisher. "While editing changes were made based on recommendations by the Council on Environmental Quality," she said at Nadler's hearing, "I believed those changes to be upsetting in some cases but not false. I still believe that to be true." Did she feel "political pressure" to doctor the press releases? "No," Kreisher said. For her part, Whitman said that she "felt no 'extreme pressure' from the White House" either.

Democrat Bill Pascrell of New Jersey was irate over the altering of a news release drafted on September 14, 2001, which noted that debris samples collected in Lower Manhattan's financial district showed traces of asbestos ranging from 2.1 percent to 3.3 percent--above EPA's "1 percent trigger for defining asbestos material." In the original version of this release, prior to White House edits, the next sentence read: "The concern raised by these samples would be for the workers at the cleanup site and for those workers who might be returning to their offices on or near Water Street on Monday, September 17, 2001." Why, Pascrell demanded, was this sentence removed?

Holding a copy of the original draft, Thernstrom responded to Pascrell by reading the next sentence, which had also been cut: "OSHA Director John Henshaw emphasized that the level [of asbestos] found, even if re-suspended in the air, does not violate OSHA standards."

Of all the Thernstrom edits, said Kreisher, "the only substantive change had to do with the cleaning"--specifically, EPA's post-9/11 recommendation that New Yorkers get a "professional cleaning" of their indoor spaces. Thernstrom excised this suggestion because, as he told the subcommittee, "That was a jurisdictional question involving which agency had responsibility for providing New Yorkers the guidance on that issue." In the pertinent press release, EPA deferred to city officials.

Throughout the hearing, Whitman and her Democratic inquisitors often seemed to be talking past each other. She stressed that EPA's encouraging assessments applied to the general ambient air quality in Lower Manhattan, not to the air quality amidst the World Trade Center rubble (referred to frequently as "the pile"). Indeed, EPA distributed fliers--one of which Whitman showed during her testimony--urging Ground Zero workers to wear protective eyewear and respirators, and to clean their gear appropriately. EPA kept up a steady drumbeat about these safety measures, said Whitman.

John Henshaw, the former OSHA chief, enumerated his own agency's efforts. "During the first three weeks following the attack," he said, "OSHA gave out respirators at a rate of 4,000 a day. Over the 10-month [cleanup] period, OSHA distributed more than 131,000 respirators to personnel working at the World Trade Center." Of course, not everyone at Ground Zero chose to wear those respirators--which can be quite onerous, especially in warm weather--and many have since reported respiratory illnesses.

While Whitman and Henshaw spoke before the subcommittee, several World Trade Center emergency responders sat in the audience. Outside the Rayburn building, protesters had been chanting "Compensation Now! Compensation Now!" That gets to the inevitable question of legal liability, which was never far from the surface of this hearing: Are Whitman and others responsible for those who became sick after breathing post-9/11 air?

In February 2006, a district court found Whitman culpable in a class-action suit. This past April, however, an appellate court dismissed a similar case brought by a handful of first responders. "If anything," the latter court explained, "the importance of the EPA's mission counsels against broad constitutional liability in this situation: the risk of such liability will tend to inhibit EPA officials in making difficult decisions about how to disseminate information to the public in an environmental emergency. Knowing that lawsuits alleging intentional misconduct could result from the disclosure of incomplete, confusingly comprehensive, or mistakenly inaccurate information, officials might default to silence in the face of the public's urgent need for information."

Broadly speaking, EPA and OSHA recognized the dangers of Ground Zero air, while taking a more relaxed view of the air quality in Lower Manhattan as a whole. As for the dust, EPA deferred on that score to the New York City Department of Health, which gave instructions to residents on how to clean indoor spaces. City officials may or may not have offered good advice. Likewise, EPA may have committed methodological errors in assessing the ambient air quality. But that is a far cry from purposely misrepresenting the facts so as to reopen the Wall Street trading floors--the specific accusation that seemed to set pulses racing among Whitman's interrogators.

The most authoritative rebuttal of the "White House and EPA lied" charge came from the 9/11 Commission, which has been exalted as a gold standard of bipartisanship. Panel members looked into the post-9/11 air-quality spat and reported their findings in a lengthy endnote (Chapter 10, Note 13). They concluded that "although the White House review process resulted in some editorial changes to the press releases, these changes were consistent with what the EPA had already been saying without White House clearance."

Did Wall Street trump sound science? "We found no evidence of pressure on EPA to say the air was safe in order to permit the markets to reopen," said the commission. "Moreover, the most controversial release that specifically declared the air safe to breathe was released after the markets had already reopened."

The obliteration of more than 200,000 tons of steel and roughly 425,000 cubic yards of concrete in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 created a unique public health challenge, one that experts will probably be arguing about for a long time. As the 9/11 Commission explained: "The EPA did not have the health-based benchmarks needed to assess the extraordinary air quality conditions in Lower Manhattan after 9/11. The EPA and the White House therefore improvised and applied standards developed for other circumstances in order to make pronouncements regarding air safety, advising workers at Ground Zero to use protective gear and advising the general population that the air was safe. Whether those improvisations were appropriate is still a subject for medical and scientific debate."

In short, there was no White House-engineered campaign to put out faulty information. But as long as New Yorkers remain sick, their class-action lawsuits unresolved, and Democrats convinced of the Bush administration's fundamental duplicity, the controversy will rage on.

Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.



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