City of Dust Read online

  When he arrived at the confusion of Lower Manhattan early on September 16, a pretty Sunday morning tainted by the inescapable sense of dread, Lioy already had an inkling of what he was going to find. As each 110-story paragon of modern architecture and unbridled capitalism had disassembled in ten transfixing, confounding seconds, he had been at the quirky 120-year-old Victorian home that he and his wife, Jeanie, lovingly restored in suburban Cranford, New Jersey, watching spellbound on TV. With his years of experience studying environmental contamination, Lioy was certain the doomed buildings contained a long list of dangerous chemicals and harmful elements that would be blown far and wide by even the gentlest breeze. He also was quite familiar with the complicated grid of Lower Manhattan that had been blanketed by the dust. He’d grown up across the Hudson from New York and had watched the towers being built. Lioy’s spine had stiffened as the television screen filled with images of first one and then, 29 minutes later, a second angry thunderhead of dust roaring through the streets like a bloated tornado, blotting out the sun while engulfing everything—and everyone—in its path.

  In the world of environmental health science, what looks bad often ends up being bad for people unlucky enough to live or work around the suspected hazard. That’s the easy part of the science, which has existed only since the world became sensitive to environmental issues in the 1970s. The hard part is getting anyone to do anything to eliminate the hazards, or even control them. In the past, factories, shipyards, mines, and the towns around them were routinely contaminated by industrial processes, but little or nothing was done to correct things. People got sick. Many died. Even when a link between working conditions and disease was suspected, few thought anything could be changed. Fewer still were willing to do what it took to make a difference.

  Environmental health had not always been Lioy’s passion. He had never worked in a factory, and big industry was not a part of his family background. But it was a part of the environment in which he was raised. His father, Nicholas, an Italian immigrant, was part owner of a building in the gray industrial town of Passaic that housed a combination delicatessen and liquor store. As a teenager, Paul often worked in the deli and came to prefer being there—or playing sandlot baseball—to wasting time in the classroom. He was an indifferent student, too smart for school, too lazy or distracted to strike out on his own. His report card was regularly marked “L.A.” in behavior—it stood for “lousy attitude.”

  But then Lioy discovered science, particularly chemistry. More important, he found out that he was good at it. He saw a problem and was challenged by the mechanics of trying to figure out the answer. And the beauty of the answers, the intricate structures of the physical world and the way elements stacked atop one another, linked in curious ways according to intractable rules, intrigued him. He studied physics and applied mathematics, and in 1975 earned his PhD in environmental science at Rutgers. One of his first jobs after graduating was a safe bureaucratic one as an engineer with the Interstate Sanitation Commission that served New York and New Jersey. One of the first projects he was thrown into there was testing a theory advanced by a colleague that ozone in the atmosphere was not produced locally, but was being transported in the air from Midwestern states. Elaborate testing gear was set up on the highest spots around, including the roof of the recently completed World Trade Center. Lioy collected and analyzed the data, eventually coming up with an answer (much of the ozone turned out not to be produced locally, but came from faraway states).

  Thirty years later, Lioy was sent back to the trade center by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, an arm of the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the fear and confusion of those first days after the planes smashed into the towers, officials at the institute ignored pronouncements by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Environmental Protection Agency about conditions in Lower Manhattan. They were thinking about the fallout and the potential danger it represented for the people who lived and worked there, including the rapidly expanding horde of workers scraping through the top layer of the monstrous debris pile for survivors. As deputy director of the environmental institute in New Jersey (which is sponsored jointly by Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey), a member of the faculty at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and a nationally recognized expert on air exposure, Lioy was a natural choice to lead the investigation. Lioy had excused Giuliani’s optimistic outlook about the dust as political necessity, but it struck him as strange that Christie Whitman, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and former Republican governor of New Jersey, had sounded no warning about any contaminants other than asbestos. Just two days after the attack, Whitman’s agency stated that monitoring and sampling for asbestos was “very reassuring about potential exposure of rescue crews and the public to environmental contaminants.”1

  For the firefighters and police officers working on the pile; for the news cameramen breathing in noxious gases as they flew over the superhot debris in helicopters; for the first ironworkers who scrambled over the still-smoking mound to begin the massive job of removing more than 1.5 million tons of mangled steel; and for the volunteers, office workers, and residents who all gulped the tainted air into their frightened lungs, there would be only speculation, not hard scientific facts, about what they had actually been exposed to in those first hours and days after the buildings fell.

  Lioy left home before sunrise that Sunday morning, steering his black Lincoln Mark VIII up the Garden State Parkway toward the George Washington Bridge. It was hardly an emergency vehicle, or even a sensible one for such a mission. The only outward sign that this wasn’t just a weekend drive was the copy of an American flag from a local newspaper that Lioy had taped to his back window. In those first hyper-patriotic days after the attacks, so many people felt the urge to fly the flag that supplies ran out. Newspapers printed their own. Lioy’s aging Lincoln wasn’t the only car to have sprouted one.

  That weekend, the bridge was the only way to get a private car like Lioy’s across the Hudson River from New Jersey to the city. The Lincoln and Holland tunnels both had been closed to most traffic since the 11th, and all the ferries and trains into the city had been cancelled. On his way north, Lioy stopped to pick up a colleague, Dr. Clifford Weisel, who was deputy director of Rutgers’ exposure science division. Once over the bridge, they headed downtown to Canal Street, the edge of the restricted zone. There they steered east, hoping to find a way past the police barriers and into the hot zone. The closer they got, the more chaotic everything became. Police were out in force. Dazed residents wandered around, looking for a way into or out of the restricted zone. Normal routines were disrupted; the unexpected suddenly became unexceptional. Finally, Lioy pulled over to a police barricade. He showed his Rutgers ID and took out the letter he had received from the National Institute asking him to investigate conditions at the site. With his voice of calm reason, Lioy explained his mission, then held his breath as the duty cop turned a suspicious eye toward the Lincoln. The big black coupe with the flag in the back window must have given the policeman pause, but he waved them in.

  Lioy drove slowly through the familiar streets that now looked like a scene from The Twilight Zone. Most people had been evacuated, and nothing was moving but emergency vehicles. Cruising the abandoned streets in the Mark VIII might have seemed theatrical, even farcical, but Lioy wasn’t thinking about that. From the moment he had watched the towers fall, he had been at turns angry and confused. He recognized that he was reacting emotionally, seeing things as an American who had benefited greatly from the opportunity that the nation offered and that the terrorists deplored, not as the dispassionate scientist he was trained to be. The days since that awful Tuesday morning had been interminable. Everyone who had watched the towers come apart wanted to be able to do something in response. Now Lioy had his chance to pitch in. Now he could matter.

  He parked the car at the edge of
the East River near the Manhattan Bridge and walked in from there, knowing that security would get tighter the nearer he and Weisel got to the debris pile. They had packed the trunk with essentials—they did not expect to find electricity for any sophisticated monitoring device. Besides, they figured that carrying around anything that looked technical might seem suspicious and get them detained, or worse. All they brought with them were notebook-sized sample bags, labels, plastic Fisher Scientific shovels, and a small camera.

  It didn’t take long to find what they had come for. They walked less than five minutes before they saw a light blue Chevrolet Lumina sedan parked near a cyclone fence. It clearly hadn’t been moved or touched since 9/11, and an overhanging tree had shielded it from the rain on September 14. The car was about four-tenths of a mile east of ground zero, in the path of the initial dust plume as it blew over the East River into Brooklyn on the morning of the attacks. The windshield was blanketed with a thick layer, 4 to 6 inches deep, of light gray dust; the car looked like it had been left untouched after a snowstorm. With just one swipe of the Fisher shovel, Lioy filled a sample bag with nearly a pound of material. He was surprised at how light and fluffy it seemed, given its origin. He didn’t yet know what the dust contained, but he knew that it wasn’t merely dust. It should have been classified as remains, the essence of bustling commerce and life itself—thousands of snuffed-out personal lives. In seconds, it all had been reduced to this most elemental form. He marked the sample bag with the time, 8:20 a.m., and the place, Cherry Street in Lower Manhattan. The date was September 16.

  After sealing the first sample bag, Lioy and Weisel pressed on. A few yards away, they found more undisturbed dust, which they also bagged and recorded. They then turned back to the car and loaded the samples in the trunk without getting close enough to see ground zero for themselves. Lioy later regretted that decision and wished he had ventured into the inner circle of hell that morning. But he was a scientist, and his mission—to collect dust samples—was accomplished.

  He also knew that he would be returning the next day, September 17, when Wall Street was scheduled to reopen. He had a second assignment, this one from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the large bi-state agency that had built the trade center and owned the ground on which it stood. The Port Authority had asked Lioy’s colleague Mark Robson to pull together a team to do an initial analysis of the environment at the 16-acre site. This time, Lioy left the Lincoln at home and drove up in a rented van with four other scientists.

  With Port Authority officials escorting them, the Rutgers team easily crossed the security barriers at Canal Street and entered the restricted zone, which extended from the destroyed trade center to a ring of commercial and residential buildings that had also been damaged, some severely, in the attack. The scientists were brought to a prep station, where each was given a hard hat, white haz-mat overalls, boots, gloves, and a half-face respirator. They spent much of the rest of the day at the heart of ground zero, getting close enough to feel the infernos beneath the debris. The air around the pile was the most contaminated in the city; Lioy and the others wore their respirator masks and were puzzled to see firefighters and construction workers in the same area without theirs. As the group walked along Cortlandt Street, one block east of the trade center’s foundations, Lioy grabbed another sample from a protected ledge. Because the dust did not appear to have been diluted by rain, he figured it could reveal what had been in the air in those primal moments just after the towers came down.

  At the time Lioy began his investigation, the dust was not considered a priority. With Wall Street reopening and the reeling nation trying to get back on its feet, most people were desperate to hear some positive news. And while most took nervous comfort in official pronouncements that the air seemed safe, men like Lioy knew from experience that heavy exposure to such a broad range of contaminants would likely harm the respiratory systems of the men and women who worked there. As someone who had already spent years studying environmental exposures, Lioy was aware that the twin towers, built in the early 1970s, contained tons of asbestos fireproofing that had probably been ripped from the steel beams it was intended to protect. Once loose, the asbestos fibers had spread over Lower Manhattan in the towering dust plume.

  “The first order of business was to test for asbestos, but in retrospect, I think it was a mistake,” Lioy recalled. “We had a situation where people swallowed gobs and gobs of this stuff. We should have been thinking about ways to characterize it so we could look for acute respiratory disease”—that is, the kinds of reactions that would befall responders within days, not the decades that asbestos can take to do its work. But since asbestos was the hazard that every New Yorker knew about, “at that moment, people just grabbed for asbestos.”

  Within days of the attacks, nearly all of the city’s firefighters, and many other men and women working on the pile, started to cough. Some of them took time away from the desperate search to see their own doctors and complain that, since 9/11, they couldn’t stop coughing and had not felt themselves. Most kept searching.

  Millions had watched New York’s tallest buildings disintegrate, and then, from different angles and perspectives shown on television, they saw them come apart again and again in the days following the attacks. What people didn’t know then was what engineers subsequently determined about exactly what happened to bring down the towers that had once seemed indestructible. The jets had smashed into each building at around 500 miles per hour, severing steel columns designed to work together to hold up the colossal structures. The remaining columns were strong enough to support the weight of the floors above for a short time after the impacts. But as fires fueled by the thousands of gallons of jet fuel raged, the high-strength steel began to weaken and eventually buckle on the floors nearest the impact zone. Stirrups holding the lightweight floor trusses to the exterior skeleton were deformed by the heat and soon pulled apart. The entire block of upper floors above the area where the planes had smashed into the buildings twisted almost imperceptibly, then tilted and collapsed with tremendous force, as though one building were dropped on top of another. What happened next was unprecedented. Engineers who studied the collapse extensively believe the first collapsing floor traveled the 3.7-meter distance from ceiling to floor in 0.87 seconds. Subsequent floors fell even faster,. The ocean of air in the building was compressed by the collapsing floors and had nowhere else to go but downward, then out. The dust cloud unleashed by the destruction was powerful enough to blow responders who weren’t killed immediately right off their feet. The collapses poured an estimated 100,000 micrograms of particles into every cubic meter of air,2 a whirlwind of dust so dense that it nearly solidified the air and turned it into a blinding black curtain for several minutes. Years later, when workmen undertook the laborious task of tearing down the badly damaged Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street, at the southern end of ground zero, they found that the pulverized construction material had been blown into the building with such force that it raced through the elevator shafts and then blew out through the narrow spaces around the closed doors on each floor, leaving halos of dust.

  Although Americans were deluged with the sobering images of destruction, little was known with certainty about the composition of the dust and the effect it might have on those who were breathing it. Even less was known about the extremely toxic smoke and gases rising from the burning pile in those first days. No air monitors capable of capturing the toxic emissions were functioning, nor could they be brought to Lower Manhattan quickly enough to record the crucial data.

  Common sense would dictate that there was danger. Common sense would say that there had to be asbestos in the dust because the trade center was one of the last buildings in New York to have asbestos fireproofing. Common sense would make it clear that anyone working on or near the pile would be exposed to an immense amount of dust and other health hazards. But emotions ruled those days, not common sense, and it was widely accepted that wearing
a dust mask when thousands of victims could have been lying beneath the rubble was not only unnecessary, it was unpatriotic.

  Lioy did not wear a dust mask when he collected his first samples. But he did have one on the following day when he participated in the Port Authority task force. Still, even he didn’t keep the respirator on all day—it was just too hot, too uncomfortable and too difficult to communicate while wearing it. He wore it religiously anywhere near the pile, even though few of the firefighters and responders did so. For the rest of the time, it was just hanging around his neck.

  For days after he returned to the laboratories at Rutgers’ Piscataway campus, those days stretching into weeks and months and, eventually, years, Lioy and his colleagues delved into the intimate makeup of the dust, studying the tiniest particles as they tried to understand this almost unfathomable event. They began by dividing the big plastic bags of dust into smaller samples, putting some in chem-lab jars and keeping the rest in plastic pouches.