NYPL alert

[Doug Millison]

The Air Down There

More than five months after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers,
as many as 6,000 workers still enter the Ground Zero site daily to clean up
the remains of fallen buildings. But within those remains, reports Todd
Bates of Poynter.org, is an enormous environmental and health risk that the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the news media have downplayed to
the public.
Before the north tower of the WTC collapsed, the building reportedly
contained 300 to 400 tons of friable asbestos. As a result, the collapse of
the towers created an enormous cloud of asbestos-tainted dust and
pollutants that some speculate could last for years -- even decades. While
it takes approximately 15 to 40 years to see asbestos-related health
effects such as lung cancer, more than 4,000 WTC rescue workers already
have acquired a persistent "World Trade Center cough," according to news
reports.
While the EPA uses high-powered vacuums and an indoor wash station to rid
cleanup workers of the dust, that doesn't account for the people who work
in buildings around Ground Zero. Some of the air intakes of lower
Manhattan's buildings were not shut down after the towers' collapse,
according to Bates. Those buildings are now contaminated with asbestos
lodged between the ceiling and the floor, where the air intakes are located.
Further complicating the environmental and health debate is some 1.5
million tons of steel scrap that has been sold to companies in India and
Asia. According to Nityanand Jayaraman and Kenny Bruno of CorpWatch, more
than 30,000 tons of scrap -- possibly contaminated with asbestos, PCBs,
cadmium and mercury -- already have been exported to India, where workers
wearing no protection have unloaded the steel.
Steel scrap is commonly contaminated, and the health risks from the WTC
scrap may not be the same level of toxicity that is at Ground Zero. But
there are no safe levels of exposure to cancer-causing agents like asbestos
and PCBs, say Jayaraman and Bruno, and once ingested or inhaled,
carcinogens tend to build up in the body. Furthermore, the burden of
preventing toxic waste from being imported into the country has fallen to
India, because the United States has refused to sign the Basel Convention
-- a treaty that prohibits developing countries from exporting hazardous
material to industrializing nations.
--Kate Garsombke

*	The Air Down There, Todd Bates, Poynter.com
*
http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/012502.htm

Trading in Disaster: World Trade Center Scrap Lands in India, Nityanand
Jayaraman and Kenny Bruno, CorpWatch (site has been down lately)

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=1608