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EPA Response to September 11 |  |
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It
is sometimes easy to forget that EPA Region 2 employees,
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Seconds after the first explosion, Kathy Callahan, then acting director of the region's Emergency and Remedial Response Division, telephoned Bruce Sprague, head of the Response and Prevention Branch in Edison, to set in motion the region's emergency response. In those first moments, Callahan believed it was a horrendous accident that might require EPA's involvement because of the smoke, fire, and airplane fuel.
Many employees witnessed the second plane's impact from their office windows at 290 Broadway, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. One of them was Deputy Regional Administrator William J. Muszynski, who was acting Regional Administrator for the first three months of the response. "When the second plane hit," Muszynski says, "there was no question that this was not an accident. You could tell from the way the plane approached that it was no accident. That's when people in the building began to be concerned that perhaps these (federal) buildings were also targeted, and people began to leave the building."
While the Manhattan office evacuated, EPA's Edison office geared up.
Neil Norrell was one of many Edison employees watching the events unfold on TV. "When the second plane hit," Norrell says, "we just started getting stuff ready. We weren't sure what we were going to do, but we figured we'd be doing something."
Within minutes, Sprague dispatched the first crew of Agency on-scene coordinators (OSCs) from Edison to New York City to monitor ambient environmental conditions. OSCs Mike Solecki, Mike Ferriola, Gad Tawadros, and Bob Montgomery were a few blocks away when the first tower began to collapse.
"Someone yelled, ‘I smell gas, I smell gas' and everyone began running," Solecki says. "The dust there was so thick, I couldn't see the hand in front of my face."
The OSCs had to scramble just to find where New York City had set up its temporary command center. The city's state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center had been located in the World Trade Center complex and was destroyed in the collapse, sending the mayor and other top officials scurrying for safety. All radio communications were lost, and the dust was so bad, not even EPA's satellite phones worked.
Overcoming such obstacles, the OSCs took the first dust samples within an hour or two of the collapse. "We didn't really have a lot of sampling equipment," Solecki says, "So we went to a local store and bought ziploc bags. We had to do things like that," he says.
Muszynski, who returned to his office after sending 290 Broadway employees home and coordinated the Region 2 response through computer contact with Sprague and phone contact with EPA headquarters, points out, "While most people were going away from the site, our emergency crews were coming toward the site. That's part of the initial reaction, and I think it's predominantly because of the training they have about how to respond to a disaster."
"It wasn't until weeks later," Sprague recalls, "that I realized, when I finally had some time to really think, I wonder whether these guys thought about the danger that they were going into. They were going to go through the Holland Tunnel. Well, was the Holland Tunnel going to be blown up? Was there something else that was going to happen? I didn't even think about that. There were so many other things racing through my mind at that time."
Later that day, after the buildings collapsed, EPA sent crews from its Environmental Response Team (ERT), also located in Edison, to Brooklyn and Liberty State Park, just across from lower Manhattan. The Brooklyn crew gathered dust and air samples, the New Jersey team only air samples, "because the wind wasn't blowing there," Muszynski remembers.
Three Region 2 employees lost family members in the attacks that day. Many others, including OSC Steve Touw, lost dear friends.
"Father Mychal Judge (the New York City Fire Department chaplain listed as the first casualty of the World Trade Center attacks) actually married my wife and I," Touw explains. "He had been the parish priest at our church when my wife was in high school and was very actively involved in the parish. So when we got engaged, we immediately called Father Mychal and asked him to come back and do the wedding. When I was driving home on the night of the 11th, I got hold of my wife on the phone and she told me she had heard on the news that Father Mychal was killed. So I took this response very personally."
With its lower Manhattan headquarters off-limits for nearly two weeks, Region 2 began 24-hour operations in Edison. By the morning of September 12, the analysis of the bulk dust samples taken on the day of the attacks was completed, showing asbestos levels ranging from non-detects to 4.5 percent (1 percent is the level at which dust is considered to be asbestos-containing). That day, EPA on-scene coordinators established nine monitoring stations in the World Trade Center area.
Although EPA eventually monitored for hundreds of contaminants,
OSC Chris Jimenez, who arrived at Ground Zero on September 12,
explains how they first approached the disaster. "The way
we started was, OK, we know asbestos is an issue. We know VOCs
(volatile organic compounds) are going to be an issue because
of the burning. We also knew there are other chemicals that you'll
find as a result of fires – acid gases as an example. We
knew we were going to want to sample those immediately."
Jimenez says that one of the first difficulties was in establishing air monitoring locations. "We couldn't really get very close because the police and fire departments were trying to keep everyone back. It was incredibly smoky. We ended up having to run because there were alarms going off from buildings possibly coming down."
From Edison, the Region 2 leadership worked with EPA headquarters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and New York city and state agencies to coordinate a multi-faceted response, acting on FEMA mission assignments under the Federal Response Plan triggered by the disaster declaration issued by President Bush the night of the attacks.
In addition to the monitoring already under way, EPA assumed lead responsibility for hazardous waste collection and disposal, street vacuuming and power washing, and the operation of wash stations for workers and trucks at Ground Zero and the landfill. (Strike Teams from the U.S. Coast Guard's National Strike Force provided enormous support – both manpower and technical assistance – as EPA carried out its mission assignments.)
Along with its critical role in protecting public health and safety, EPA took part in helping Wall Street get up and running. On September 12, EPA began vacuuming the streets, using specially equipped trucks to remove dust and debris from lower Manhattan's financial district. Over the next few days, with help from the Coast Guard, EPA also escorted financial district executives back to their offices to retrieve backup computer system files.
OSC Andy Confortini explains: "The Bond Market Association would fax over a list of the firms that needed to get into their buildings. We would set up a schedule to meet up with them outside the Ground Zero perimeter, get them onto our vehicles, take them down to their buildings, give them a mask and take them where they had to be to get their backup systems and files. The Coast Guard would go there the day before to evaluate the building for ‘immediately dangerous to life and health' conditions – combustible gas, low oxygen, high CO2, any kind of volatile organics. They would do that recon and report back to me. There were a lot of natural gas leaks, but there was only one building that we never got into (the Deutsche Bank building adjacent to the WTC site) because of structural concerns and because of gas leaks."
EPA Administrator Whitman toured Ground Zero on September 13, accompanied by Muszynski. "There was a concern that one or two of the buildings had the danger of collapsing," Muszynski recalls. "As we were walking down there they had one or two alarms. Can you imagine evacuating and saying, no, it's OK to go back to work, and you go back to work and the alarm goes off and you have to evacuate again? To think about the courage people had to go back in those conditions and still search for survivors, it was incredible."
Over the first week of the response, as police, fire fighters, and rescue workers searched for victims amid the rubble and battled the fires that would burn for months within the pile, EPA expanded its ambient environmental monitoring activities, increasing both the number of fixed stations and the contaminants to be probed. On-scene coordinators were also assigned to monitor conditions at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the World Trade Center was transported for sifting by federal crime investigators, including members of EPA's Criminal Investigation Division.
The chief purpose of EPA's monitoring was to assess health risks for the workers at Ground Zero and for those who would soon return to work and live in lower Manhattan. EPA labs and private labs under contract to the Agency analyzed air and dust samples for asbestos and a host of other contaminants, then turned the data over to an interagency team of scientists. The team included Dore LaPosta, then acting director of the region's Division of Environmental Science and Assessment (DESA).
The challenge was to determine at which level each contaminant posed a health concern, so that the data could be reported meaningfully. Health-based benchmarks had never been established for many contaminants being monitored.
For example, no outdoor standards existed for airborne asbestos exposure, which more commonly occurs indoors. Asbestos, a heat-resistant material used as fire-proofing in part of the World Trade Center, is known to cause lung cancer and asbestosis. EPA turned to a nationally accepted standard for asbestos that is based on long-term indoor exposure: the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA) standard of 70 structures per square millimeter, which is used to determine whether children may re-enter a school building after asbestos removal or abatement.
"Once we got the data," says LaPosta, "we had to start judging and evaluating it against whatever we came up with as the best parameters. We had to work with the risk assessment people and other people in the field to figure out, for instance, whether the AHERA standard is the right standard and what does that mean from a risk perspective? And what do we do about dioxin – do we use a 30-year removal number, do we use a one-year number, or do we use an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) number? These criteria issues became a data management and assessment problem we had to work through."
Sampling quickly extended from air and dust to water. After a heavy rain prompted concerns that hazardous material from the collapsed buildings was seeping into water supplies, EPA sampled drinking water at 13 distribution points in New York City as well as water pumped out of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train tunnels that flooded after the collapse. Drinking water sampling results showed no contamination and, in fact, the only impact on water detected by EPA was a small amount of temporarily elevated levels of asbestos and other compounds in storm-drain runoff in the Hudson River.
As the financial district returned to operation, EPA continued its vacuuming activities. Bulk dust sampling in and around Ground Zero had indicated an uneven spread of asbestos-containing dust in the area; the Agency decided to vacuum all public spaces throughout lower Manhattan. Coordinated by OSC Dan Harkay, 10 vacuum trucks removed dust from streets and sidewalks, open areas such as parks and sandboxes, and federal building lobbies (including 290 Broadway) into which response workers had carried dust on their shoes.
With the lower Manhattan cleanup progressing quickly, EPA set a return date of September 24 for employees working at 290 Broadway. In the interim, Muszynski and Assistant Regional Administrator Herb Barrack worked with EPA headquarters to restore the facility's communications capabilities, which were lost when a major telephone switching station was inundated with water following the World Trade Center collapse. They also arranged through EPA headquarters to provide trauma counseling for Region 2 employees, enlisting a Massachusetts-based group with broad experience in counseling disaster victims.
"The question was," Barrack says, "should we bring employees right to the regional office or transition by another location first, where they wouldn't be immediately confronted with going back to the horrors that they experienced? We reached consensus that it was better to do it offsite."
The voluntary session, held at the Grand Hyatt in mid-town Manhattan, drew more than 600 employees – about three-quarters of the region's workforce. The trauma group also provided counselors for EPA employees re-entering their lower Manhattan offices on September 24.
"The first day you came in," Norrell says about his on-scene coordinator experience at Ground Zero, "you didn't have any idea what to expect. For the first hour or so you found yourself from time to time just staring at it, seeing and not believing. It was enormous."
OSCs assigned to Ground Zero carried out several functions: removing hazardous materials; monitoring environmental conditions in and around the site; establishing on-site wash stations to decontaminate workers and trucks involved in the rescue and recovery; contributing personal protection equipment to the rescue effort; and communicating with recovery workers and other agencies about monitoring results and their implications for health and safety.
Solecki recalls climbing through gaps in and below the pile at Ground Zero alongside search-and-rescue personnel, beginning the third night. "I went through the hole every night. I worked a lot with the USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) people, and I actually went through with them looking for bodies. That wasn't my purpose – my purpose was looking for hazmats ... I didn't really find anything at first because there was so much rubble."
EPA on-scene coordinators pumped approximately 600,000 gallons of oil from the World Trade Center sub-basements and removed a host of other hazardous materials, such as dry cleaning fluids, fire extinguishers, and underground fuel tanks. They also monitored for Freon R-22 leaks from the trade center's enormous refrigeration system, especially when city officials posed the possibility (later disproved) that this particular form of Freon, when combusted, would form the poison gas phosgene.
Throughout EPA's response, asbestos monitoring remained a top priority. Twice each day, OSCs collected samples from more than 20 different fixed continuous air monitoring locations in and around Ground Zero. Of the more than 9,500 samples eventually collected, only 21 measured above the 70-structures-per-square-millimeter level of concern. Even those 21 samples did not reflect a significant long-term health risk. Asbestos exposure generally becomes a health concern when high concentrations of asbestos fibers are inhaled over a long period. Illness is very unlikely to result from a single, high-level exposure, or from a short period of exposure to lower levels.
Along with asbestos monitoring, EPA sampled the ambient air for volatile organic compounds such as benzene, metals such as lead, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxin, particulates, silica, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Of particular concern were substances associated with the fires that burned at Ground Zero. Monitoring took place in the smoke plumes each day as the fires burned, and later in the recovery pits and at a number of stations ringing the Ground Zero site. Early on, EPA found elevated levels of some substances in the smoke itself, but these levels tailed off dramatically even a few feet from the source of the smoke. Once the fires ceased, the pollutants fell to either extremely low levels – well below EPA's benchmarks – or to undetectable levels.
Although the risks were considered short-term, many people, including EPA employees at 290 Broadway, had teary eyes, scratchy throats, and other respiratory problems in the early months while the fires were raging. Members of the public were instructed by EPA and the health agencies to consult their doctors if they were experiencing symptoms related to the dust and smoke from the fires.
"We were getting relatively high levels of some pretty hazardous chemicals, benzene being the most prominent of them," Jimenez says. "Right from the vents we were getting relatively high levels, but if you would take a sample just stepping away even a couple of feet, the levels would drop off dramatically. Plus, provided you were wearing your respiratory protection and changing your cartridges regularly, the levels of benzene we were finding we didn't see as hazardous to yourself."
 Volunteers and professionals alike rushed to help with recovery. Despite advice to wear respirators, many did not Larger Picture |
While OSHA and New York City, which controlled the site, had responsibility for enforcing safety standards at Ground Zero, EPA on-scene coordinators did all they could to encourage rescue workers to wear respirators and other personal protection equipment. EPA contributed tens of thousands of respirators and other equipment, using the Agency's own stock and new orders from vendors. Nevertheless, many rescue workers opted not to use the safety equipment.
"From day one, we said you gotta wear respirators," Sprague recalls, "and we supplied a lot of equipment. ... The issue became very frustrating."
Jimenez says, "Guys would be sitting near a huge plume of smoke with no respirator on, and you'd look at them and say, listen, you should be putting your respirator on. We put out press releases (advising that Ground Zero workers wear respirators). Having said that, a building falls, the building's on fire, it is made with plastics and fuel oils, it doesn't take a bit of common sense to realize that you should probably have a respirator on."
Norrell is philosophical about it. "There was absolutely nothing anyone could have said – whether you're EPA or any other agency or person – that was going to stop anybody from doing what they were doing," he said in March. "Certainly not during the first couple of days and probably even not now. Firemen are still down there finding their brothers. The only thing we could have done is exactly what we did, which was identify the need for everybody who was working here to wear a respirator, and then do the best we could in conjunction with other folks."
EPA faced a similar challenge as OSCs worked to install personal and truck wash stations at the disaster site. By September 19, seven wash stations were in operation at Ground Zero, and five more would be added in the next few days. But without the authority to enforce compliance (the City of New York controlled the site), on-scene coordinators had to rely on the power of persuasion – and ultimately the lure of a warm meal.
"Many, many conflicts were always going on," recalls Jim Daloia, Emergency Response Team leader. "The contractors on the site would say, we will build our own wash station, and besides, the site you selected was too far from our equipment."
As work continued in October and November, EPA worked to erect a 260-foot by 120-foot central wash station – heated in anticipation of winter – for all Ground Zero workers. The temporary structure provided boot and mask washes, high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) vacuums for dusty clothing, and shower stalls and lockers for worker use.
 Recovery workers in EPA's central wash station Larger Picture |
"We built this thing really big," Sprague recalls, "thinking that half of it would be used by the City for something, maybe either for food or for an indoor memorial that the workers from Ground Zero would get some positive feelings from. When the City decided to have the Salvation Army use it for food, that really made the operation go well."
"When we first opened it up, we had a trickle of people coming in," says John Higgins, who acted as operations chief for the regional response. "That could have been a very large white elephant. If we didn't partner with New York City and the Salvation Army and get food in there, forget it."
The tent, which acquired the nickname "Taj Mahal" among workers, eventually attracted more than 650,000 worker-visits to its wash stations and food lines – 6,000 people on its busiest days.
Nine months at Ground Zero provided EPA on-scene coordinators with technical, logistical, and physical challenges – and human ones as well. This was not only a disaster site but also a murder scene.
"You'd see the look in the fire fighters' eyes whenever they would recover somebody, or the police would recover somebody from the uniformed services," Touw says. "They'd have the procession of the flag-draped stretcher. You'd see these grown men, these muscular construction workers, firemen, and police officers, holding hands saying the Lord's Prayer and crying, hugging each other after it was over. Things like that were a constant reminder of what had happened."
OSC Arlene Anderson, who spent a month and a half working at Ground Zero, says, "I will never forget the day when they found the first hundred victims in the North Tower. It was an image that will always stay with me."
"There were definitely things here that I never thought I'd have to see, never thought I'd have to deal with," Norrell recalls. "The hardest part is when they were bringing families (of victims) through. You realize that a wife who lost a husband, or a husband who lost a wife, they're going to look at this big dusty pile of steel that has some smoke coming out, and that's it. That's the only closure they're ever going to have."
On a wall in the EPA trailer at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, a makeshift sign was scrawled on duct tape, reading, A little bit of hell on earth.
OSC Greg DeAngelis explains that, as emotionally charged an assignment as Ground Zero rescue and recovery was, work at the landfill was perhaps even harder. "They were sifting to a much finer detail, finding many, many more very graphic things," DeAngelis says. "It's one thing to find a whole, dead body, but when you find bits and pieces... I feel for these cops. They have to be having nightmares from things that they're seeing on a daily basis. It's just absolutely brutal."
EPA was one of many federal, local, state, and nonprofit agencies supporting the police work at Fresh Kills. The landfill, officially closed to garbage disposal just a few months earlier, became a sifting area for investigators hunting for evidence from the World Trade Center rubble. Mountains of debris were hauled by barge from Manhattan to the landfill during the cleanup at Ground Zero; a separate area at the landfill was dedicated to evidence from Building Seven, which housed FBI files, weapons, and other highly sensitive federal government items.
Just as at Ground Zero, EPA provided wash stations for workers and vehicles, monitored air and dust for asbestos and other contaminants, and removed hazardous materials. At the landfill EPA also inspected the washing and vacuuming of cars crushed in the collapse and the washing of New York City Department of Sanitation barges. Most of the cars were decontaminated and eventually sent off-site for recycling.
EPA on-scene coordinators initially set up 10 air sampling locations at the landfill – eight around the perimeter and two within the sifting areas. They later added three off-site locations to make sure the winds weren't carrying contaminants into the surrounding communities. During the course of the landfill operations, EPA took more than 5,200 air samples, finding asbestos above the AHERA standard in less than 1 percent of the samples.
"We never hit the OSHA Permissible Exposure Limit," DeAngelis points out, referring to the federal standard for asbestos exposure under OSHA (.1 fiber per cubic centimeter averaged over an eight-hour day), designed to protect workers on the job. The discrepancy between the AHERA and OSHA standards caused confusion among some workers, according to DeAngelis. "When we would come up with a hit on (the AHERA) standard, but the OSHA standards wasn't coming up with a hit because it was less than their level of concern, in the workers' minds somebody was lying to them."
Confortini took charge of EPA's effort to build wash stations. The stations, which were completed in the first week in October, processed about 2,000 people a day and replaced temporary washing facilities provided by the National Guard. "There were people sitting in cars with their work gloves on," Confortini recalls. "They were so focused on evidence retrieval, and retrieval of remains, that they weren't thinking about health and safety."
After the wash stations were built, Confortini communicated regularly with managers of each of the law enforcement agencies involved in the sifting to achieve compliance with the site's health and safety procedures. He credits the NYPD leadership for much of the personal hygiene success at the landfill.
"My job is not to police all these law enforcement guys who have guns and bullet-proof vests," says Confortini. "I haven't got a gun. My job was to get their management to do it. When the rank and file understood that their management recognized and mandated the washing protocols, it meant something, rather than some guy from the EPA."
Fresh Kills also served as a staging ground for the final disposal of the 1.6 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center. Thanks to concerted efforts by the city and EPA, much of the debris was recycled – including heavy steel, light steel, compressed gas cylinders, crushed cars, batteries, and flourescent light ballasts. Hazardous materials were set aside for proper disposal.
"Some of the recycling," DeAngelis says, "was done
with the eye that we didn't want materials to show up on eBay
as souvenir items. We needed to make sure, when we got certain
items like SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) bottles,
that they were crushed and cut to where they couldn't be sold
that way, and then either recycled or disposed of."
EPA faced a daily communications challenge: explaining the monitoring data in a meaningful way to news reporters, citizens, community groups, and the rescue and recovery workers. While the data was clearly showing no pattern of extended exposure to long-term health risks, individual exceedances such as those for asbestos and particulate matter were cause for concern among the press and public, especially when local residents and rescue workers began experiencing short-term health effects, such as persistent coughs.
"In a time when the public wanted absolute assurance," says EPA spokesperson Mary Mears, "not only could EPA not give it to them, but science can't give them that kind of assurance."
"People wanted to see the information," Muszynski says. "They just didn't want to see data. They wanted to see what it represented and where it came from."
With assistance from the headquarters Information Technology team, EPA established a computer database tied to the agency's Geographic Imaging System (GIS) to gather and report monitoring results for all the contaminants being sampled. Daily monitoring summaries were posted on the EPA Web site and made available to the press throughout the recovery operations. Each day, EPA brought the Fire Department and other responding agencies its latest sampling data on volatile organic compounds so that recovery workers could take appropriate precautions.
"The monitoring system was something EPA can be really proud of," says Callahan, whom Regional Administrator Jane M. Kenny placed in charge of the response's day-to-day operations. Callahan worked on the monitoring data system with LaPosta and EPA staffers including Joe Cosentino, Nick Magriples, and Mark Gallo, along with city, state, and federal agencies. "It was collaborative and forthright," Callahan says. "Everyone just kept talking and working together."
In addition to responding to the flood of press inquiries – Mears estimates that Region 2 handled upwards of 100 press calls a day in the first week of the response – EPA also reported on its monitoring results at numerous public meetings around the city and in testimony before city, state, and federal committees.
As recovery efforts at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills landfill came to an end, EPA halted its activities at these sites as well. Outdoor environmental monitoring ended at Ground Zero in late May and at the landfill several weeks later, and the wash tents came down soon afterward.
EPA's role in the response has now entered a new phase: providing local residents the assurance that their homes have been cleaned properly.
In the first several months of the response, EPA urged people who returned to dusty homes and workplaces to have these indoor spaces professionally cleaned. With concerns about indoor air quality lingering into the new year, EPA Administrator Whitman established the Task Force on Indoor Air in Lower Manhattan to address the problem.
In May, responding to the Task Force's recommendations, Regional Administrator Kenny announced a cleanup plan for residences in lower Manhattan in conjunction with the city, FEMA, OSHA, and New York State. She said in announcing the program, "While the scientific data about any immediate health risks from indoor air is reassuring, people should not have to live with uncertainty about their futures."
The voluntary program gives lower Manhattan residents the option of either having their units tested for asbestos or cleaned and then tested by professional cleaners on contract with the government. Residents can also request free HEPA vacuum cleaners through the program.
During the summer, EPA tested various cleanup techniques in a still-unoccupied building near the World Trade Center site. Testing began on a limited number of the more than 800 units at which residents requested testing only, and EPA anticipates that cleaning of the more than 3,000 units requesting cleaning and testing will begin in the next few weeks.
On the day of the attacks, Acting Regional Administrator Muszynski was preparing for a 9 a.m. meeting with officials from Puerto Rico on drinking water issues. For obvious reasons, that meeting never happened on September 11. It was finally held in the summer of 2002 – a sign that life at EPA's Region 2 is beginning to return to normal.
"Everybody understands how impossible it probably is for us to get back to do the usual things," Muszynski says. "The Trade Centers are no longer there, so it's a constant reminder. So as the Administrator has said, we will go back to doing the usual things, we just won't always do them as we usually did them."
As many Region 2 staffers look back on an unforgettable year, they do so with pride.
"Are there things we could have done better along the way? Yes, as anyone would expect," says Barbara Finazzo, who was Acting Deputy Regional Administrator last September. "But I firmly believe we responded in the best way that we knew how. I will always stand by the fact that I'm very proud of what we all did."
"There was a lot of dedication, a lot of serious consideration of science issues, a lot of reaching out to people beyond our agency who could provide information about the issues we were dealing with, and a tireless effort," says LaPosta.
"I'm proud of the fact," Mears says, "that a whole group of people from this agency pulled together in a hurry despite being traumatized on all different levels and turned our attention to whether the people in and around lower Manhattan were safe. (And) I'm really proudest of the people who actually went out there day after day after day, on that pile, taking samples, not because they were worried about their own health but because they wanted to make sure we were protecting the health of the people of New York."
Norrell may have summed it up best for his fellow OSCs – and, indeed, all EPA staff involved – when he explained the privilege he felt at taking part in the response. "Everybody in the world wanted to do something, and I was getting the chance to do something."
****
True to its mission to safeguard public health and protect the environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been playing a key role in the nation's response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. With much help from EPA headquarters and other regions, more than 200 employees from EPA's Region 2 offices in lower Manhattan and Edison, New Jersey, have engaged in the response at Ground Zero and the Staten Island landfill where debris was brought for evidence-gathering. Their major activities have included:
• monitoring air, water, and dust for potential environmental
hazards
• vacuuming dust and debris from streets and other outdoor
spaces in lower Manhattan
• removing and disposing of hazardous wastes from the sites
• creating an online database to report monitoring results
to the press and the public
• setting up wash stations and providing protective equipment
for recovery workers
• developing a cleaning and testing program for indoor residences
in lower Manhattan
"We were just doing our part," says Deputy Regional Administrator Muszynski. "We were doing our part, just as the Red Cross was doing its part, the way so many support groups were, the way the Corps of Engineers was doing its part, the way truck drivers were moving material out and doing their part."
"Beyond the science and the regulation, beyond the standards and the benchmarks, EPA is at heart about helping people," says Regional Administrator Kenny. "Our employees proved that every day of this response."
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