City of Dust Read online

  Clearly, there wasn’t time to wait, especially not after so many men and women started complaining of respiratory problems they shouldn’t have had if the air had truly been safe to breathe. Nor was there an easy explanation for why the workers who were digging in the rubble for remains weren’t wearing the masks that would have kept them from being hurt by the air that so obviously was filled with danger. There was a troubling disconnect between what was expected and what was actually happening. Even after the dust plumes had started to dissipate, it was as if the dust continued to cling to the air, blinding reason, obscuring truth, and distorting belief.

  Endnotes

  1 EPA press release, 13 September 2001.

  2 Lioy, Paul J., “Characterization of the Dust/Smoke Aerosol That Settled East of the World Trade Center (WTC) in Lower Manhattan After the Collapse of the WTC 11 September 2001,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, no. 7 (July 2002). Available at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2002/110p703-714lioy/lioy-full.html.

  3 Gavett, Stephen H., “Toxicological Effects of Particulate Matter Derived from the Destruction of the World Trade Center,” abstract presented at the American Association for Aerosol Research, 7–11 October 2002. Available at http://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_Report.cfm?dirEntryId=62264&CFID=8344117&CFTOKEN=48481859&jsessionid=203074134a7808465f213c42524179398054.

  4 USGS, “Environmental Studies of the World Trade Center Area After the September 11, 2001, Attack,” 27 November 2001. Available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/.

  5 Andrew Schneider, “Caustic Dust Blankets World Trade Center Area,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 February 2002, p. 1. See www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/special/asbestos.nsf/0/8DC49C62C3BDFD2186256CAD0076A1ED?OpenDocument.

  6 Lioy, Paul, and Panos Georgopoulos, “The Anatomy of the Exposures That Occurred Around the World Trade Center Site,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1076 (2006). Accessed at www.nycosh.org/environment_wtc/WTC/WTCexposures_Lioy_Georgopoulos.pdf.

  2. Optimism or arrogance?

  Planning for catastrophe is like planning for war. The overriding goal is to anticipate possible outcomes and engineer responses that are most likely to ensure victory. All too often, however, in both war and disaster, almost nothing turns out the way it is supposed to. What was expected does not happen as imagined. And the well-thought-out plan, the coordinated attack, the deliberate response falls apart when it is needed most.

  After the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, New York City officials understood that the city had become a prime terror target and that there could be another attempt sometime in the future. To be better prepared for the next time, Mayor Giuliani wanted a new emergency command center built where he could manage a coordinated response. He wanted a big space where all his key people could work shoulder to shoulder as he deployed forces. And he wanted the new control room to be within walking distance of City Hall. Several sites were considered, but in the end, against the advice of some, he located his emergency bunker on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, one block north of the towers that had been targeted in 1993. He spent $13 million on a Noah’s Ark response center that was designed to survive any calamity. It was self-sufficient and equipped with the most up-to-date electronics, along with its own huge reservoir of diesel fuel to run emergency generators in the event the power grid stopped functioning. The building where Giuliani’s Armageddon room took shape was connected by walkways and ramps to the rest of the trade center complex and had exceptionally large floors. Drexel Burnham Lambert, the big investment banking firm that was supposed to have rented the entire building, had backed out of the deal in 1990, leaving loads of vacant space that the city gladly took over.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Giuliani was just leaving a business breakfast in midtown when he took a call notifying him that a plane had smashed into the twin towers. As he was being driven downtown, Giuliani could not have imagined the scene that awaited him. He arrived at the trade center shortly after the second jet plowed into the towers, making it painfully clear this was no accident. The car did not drop him off at the command bunker, which was being pelted with debris from the burning towers. The building was being evacuated, and Giuliani’s aides decided that it wasn’t safe for him to be anywhere near it. Instead, he was whisked to a temporary police command post that had been set up at Church and Vesey Streets. There he met up with police commissioner Bernard Kerik. Fire department commanders had established their own command post two blocks away, on West Street. When Giuliani, who knew of the sometimes poisonous rivalry between the two groups of uniformed responders, needed to talk to the fire officials, he and Kerik walked over. Giuliani conferred briefly with Chief of Department Peter Ganci as the situation around them grew more urgent. Desperate people trapped on the upper floors had started jumping or falling from the towers. Fires raged on many floors, and huge chunks of the building rained down around them. Giuliani, Kerik, and other city officials decided to head north, seeking a safe haven where they could set up a command and communication post. Kerik took Giuliani to an office building at 75 Barclay Street, a block north of the towers, where he believed he could commandeer a working land line to the White House and to the governor’s office. With cellphone service overloaded or knocked out completely, working telephones were essential for the mayor to receive up-to-date information and to get messages out to the people of his stunned city.

  Giuliani’s team—which by then included Neal L. Cohen, the city’s health commissioner—took over the ground-floor office space on Barclay Street and got to work. But then the South Tower came down, breaking the large plate-glass windows on street level and shooting debris, dust, and ash into the temporary headquarters, forcing another hasty and unplanned escape. The police led Giuliani down to the safety of the Barclay Street building’s basement and then eventually into an adjoining building and back out onto the street.1 With horror unfolding around him, Giuliani marched up Church Street, looking for a way to take control. Until he did, no one was in charge. To the frightened New Yorkers he passed, Giuliani shouted, “Just keep going north.” The dust plume from the first collapse continued to roil the streets of Lower Manhattan, blanketing everything and everyone in its way. People who were caught in the cloud described it in various ways, but they all had in common the darkening of the sky until it became nearly impossible to see anything; a brutally strong wind that rushed out as the 110-story tower was flattened; the flurry of office papers rising and falling like flocks of gray pigeons; and the thick wave of choking material from the pulverized building that they waded through, breathed in, and swallowed as they tried to survive. And then, after the roar of the man-made mountains being torn apart, an eerie quiet that was broken by the dulled wail of an alarm from a car buried beneath the debris.

  Giuliani stumbled in the darkness for about ten blocks until he reached an empty firehouse at Houston Street and Avenue of the Americas, only to find the doors locked. The crew had responded to the unfolding emergency. The city’s top officials then tried to break into the building by smashing the combination lock on the front door. Before they could get it open, someone reached fire headquarters and took down the combination. For the next few hours, Giuliani and the others used the firehouse as a temporary command post while they took stock of what had happened and tried to figure out how to react.

  Once he finally got settled into a command post hours later at the Police Academy on East 20th Street, Giuliani provided a steady hand and a sober demeanor that calmed the city and showed a stiff-lipped, even defiant, face to the world. In many ways, the city’s survival depended on the projection of that kind of determination and grit.

  With emergency response plans torn up, and the top hierarchy of the fire department (including Chief Ganci) killed in the collapse, municipal government could have been paralyzed. Giuliani knew that in such a situation, people desperately seek out information, and if they can’t find it, they quickly replace truth with rumor, potentially
making a bad situation worse. Perhaps Giuliani’s greatest accomplishment that day was in the way he presented a face of steely control at the first news conference, even when he was asked the question that everyone who had ever been inside the towers wanted to ask: How many people died? Around 50,000 people worked at the trade center. No one knew with certainty how many had made it out before the buildings fell down, but the worst was feared. Giuliani’s immediate response was as emotional as it was restrained, a pitch-perfect answer to a tough question at a critical moment. “I don’t think we want to speculate about that,” Giuliani cautioned the reporters gathered around him at a press conference just after 2:30 that first afternoon. Here he was the broad-shouldered father offering sober advice to a frightened child: “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.”

  Giuliani was speaking honestly and from the heart; the impact was resounding. He leveled with New Yorkers and the rest of the world about the extent of the hurt that had been visited upon the city. He brought everyone up to speed on what he knew about the people who worked in the towers, as well as what he didn’t know about the extent to which the actions of the fire and police departments had managed to clear the towers before they imploded. His statement undoubtedly had the unintended effect of adding to the fears of those who had only voices on home answering machines to hang on to as they hoped for a miracle. The mayor’s blunt and open-ended assessment of the tragedy inflated horror with uncertainty. But at the very least, he prepared people for the worst.

  Lamentably, Giuliani did not continue to level with New Yorkers in the same way over the following weeks. What he did was not outright subterfuge, nor deliberate distortion of the facts. Rather, as he helped his city get back on its feet and he showed the world New York’s (and his own) toughest face, he released information in a way that suggested the gravest danger had already passed and there was little to continue to worry about. That attitude squared with instructions coming out of the Bush White House. Limited information was put out, and unrealistic assumptions were made without the support of sound science. When taken together with flawed information from other official sources, the communications led to an overriding impression that was in line with the reality most people favored, despite their best instincts otherwise.

  “The air quality is not dangerous,” Giuliani said in one of his first public statements about the environment at ground zero, early on the morning of September 12.2 Fires were raging, infernos of heat and smoke feeding off the tattered ruins of the two towers and the 91,000 liters of fuel that had spilled out of the transcontinental jets. Giuliani was worried that television viewers around the world would get the wrong impression if they glimpsed uniformed responders wearing flimsy dust masks or, rarely, a half-face respirator. So much is now known about the events of that day and their aftermath that it can be difficult to recall the extent of the uncertainty that existed then. September 11 was rife with recurring rumors that other planes were headed toward more targets in New York City or elsewhere. Some feared that more than 600 firefighters had died (twice the actual number) and 10,000 people in the towers had been killed. And, assuming the worst, there were great concerns that the planes had carried biological weapons or that the trade center rubble was emitting deadly chemicals that forced some responders to wear masks.

  “The reason that everybody is wearing masks, which I know people see it on television, and they think there must be a chemical agent or biological agent or ... the reason they’re wearing masks is, if you expose your eyes and you inhale too much of the dust, it’s going to irritate you and that can become serious,” Giuliani told New Yorkers on September 12. In a television interview the next day, Giuliani said that although asbestos tests were negative, there was plenty of dust in the air and that might give people with asthma and health conditions some trouble. “But for others,” he said, “it’s not gonna be a major problem.”3 The bottom line, according to Giuliani, was that there was hardly anything to worry about except getting back to work.

  In the months and years ahead, and especially when he ran for the Republican nomination for president, Giuliani would return to these same primal moments. Over time, the uncoordinated wandering and other less dramatic aspects of that morning would blur and be replaced by vivid images of him taking charge of his wounded city, calmly and soberly urging his people to go about their normal business. His early actions would come to have far-reaching negative consequences, but they would always have to be weighed against the good he did. If what the terrorists had aimed for by flying passenger jets into the tallest buildings in the heart of the most important financial district in the Western world, if what they had hoped the death and destruction would do was bring to the surface the worst traits of the culture they despised—envy, greed, and self-interest—then Rudy Giuliani’s lock-jaw performance denied them that satisfaction and kept the city from panicking. Yet decisions that Giuliani and his team made in the immediate aftermath would contribute to a climate of suspicion, mistrust, and, ultimately, fear that would linger far into the future.

  On Broadway, several blocks north and east of ground zero, a formidable 32-story building—clad in Deer Isle granite with just the slightest tint of salmon that shows through in certain light—houses several federal departments and agencies, including the Region 2 headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s role in responding to the disaster had been made clear in several executive orders, the most recent being Presidential Decision Directive #62, issued by Bill Clinton three years before the trade center was destroyed. The directive laid out a plan for federal responses to a terrorist attack and assigned the EPA lead responsibility for decontaminating areas that had been targeted. Some of the EPA’s air quality specialists and environmental watchdogs were within walking distance of the disaster site. It seemed like a small silver lining in the gloomiest of days.

  But just as Giuliani’s emergency command post failed at a crucial moment, the EPA found that its response plan worked better on paper than it did in real life. It was apparent right from the start that this was no ordinary hazardous waste spill, nor was ground zero anything like the worst Superfund toxic waste sites in the nation. A few blocks from EPA headquarters lay a hellish scene that scientists later agreed represented the largest environmental disaster in New York City history.4 But it was also a raging all-alarm fire, an extremely dangerous rescue operation of as yet undetermined scale, and a crime scene where thousands of people had been murdered.

  Before any rational response could be effectively implemented, the question of who was in charge of the site had to be answered. At first, it was clear that the EPA was not the lead agency. New York had marshaled its municipal resources almost immediately. By the end of the first day, some 20,000 police officers had responded to the call for help. The fire department had called in nearly all 14,000 firefighters, including those who were off duty. Other city employees mobilized quickly—thousands of transit workers came out with their heavy equipment, and sanitation workers, health officers, building inspectors, and others took their places in a massive response. At the helm of it all was Giuliani, who, after nearly eight years as mayor, operated as though he owned the city.

  The EPA saw the dust plume and knew, just as Paul Lioy had immediately recognized, that it couldn’t be good. The dust was so thick that the agency’s own satellite phones couldn’t work properly. Electricity was knocked out in parts of Lower Manhattan, further restricting the agency’s capabilities because many monitors ran on electricity. Still, it managed to collect dust samples within two hours of the buildings’ collapse. An environmental response crew was sent from the agency’s offices in Edison, NJ, about 40 miles south of Manhattan, to sample the dust and the air as best they could under the circumstances. Because that there wasn’t a lot of sampling equipment on hand that day, the rapid response team went to a local store and bought Ziploc bags.5

  After the New York City police set up a security perimeter around
the debris site, it became far more difficult for the EPA to get inside. The closest the Edison crew could get was Liberty State Park in Jersey City, opposite Lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn, where they took air samples. By the following day, the first analysis of the dust samples from ground zero was complete. Reporters had already asked about the amount of asbestos in the air and how dangerous it might be. The EPA’s tests showed a range of results, from a reassuring finding of no asbestos particles of detectible size, to worrisome samples that contained as much as 4.5 percent asbestos.

  Officials also knew there were going to be other concerns. The burning jet fuel that had torched the remains of the towers and its contents—the carpets and wooden desks, the plastic computer casings and the synthetic ceiling tiles—would be emitting volatile organic compounds and dangerous chemicals. The thousands of fluorescent bulbs containing mercury, the computer monitors containing lead, the splintered glass, the shredded fiberglass and the tons of reinforced concrete that had been turned to dust—all these and a hundred more had been discharged by the tremendous force of the collapsing buildings and saturated the air in Lower Manhattan to an extent that could only be guessed at until more tests were done.

  Sensible caution now struggled against spirited resistance and a commitment to normalcy that carried great consequence. Signs of danger were obvious. This was no factory worksite where exposures and dosages could be carefully measured. This was the nightmare scenario of one of the busiest and most crowded places on Earth being exposed to an unprecedented mix of known and suspected hazards. Hundreds of thousands of people potentially could be affected. They were office workers and residents, schoolchildren and tourists, service employees and municipal workers in Manhattan and across the rivers in Brooklyn, New Jersey, and the rest of New York. All were exposed to a mixture of contaminants whose toxicity was unknown. In a setting fraught with so much danger, the only proper response was caution.