Asbestos and 9/11

[aerocontrols]

Article

An Environmental Protection Agency memo claims city and federal officials concealed data that showed lower Manhattan air was clouded with asbestos after the World Trade Center collapse.

And officials sat on the alarming information even as they told the public it was safe to return downtown, the internal memo says.

Testing by the city Department of Environmental Protection showed the air downtown had more than double the level of asbestos considered safe for humans, claimed federal EPA environmental scientist Cate Jenkins, who supplied the memo to The Post.

Ok, the NYPost isn't always that reliable but let's assume they've got the truth here - or something close to it. It seems to me that what's missing from the public discussion is a consideration of how long the condition lasted. Aren't standards for things like this typically long-duration standards? Is this level of asbestos the sort of measurement where a building where people live or work would have to be cleaned out if it had asbestos levels this high? Is there an EPA standard for asbestos levels that humans can't be exposed to for even a couple of days? Are we going to see a bunch of sick people in the future due to this demolition and the government's refusal to tell anyone?

Cigarette smoking may give you cancer, but not if you only smoke for a week, right?

MattJ

 

[Bowser]

First of all, twice the acceptable levels is probably still pretty negligible since EPA probably has a measure of magnitude for safety. I think OSHA's exposure levels are based on weighted 8-hour averages. Asbestos is more likely a problem in folks who were occupationally exposed over decades, but people have also become sick from very short-term demolition jobs.

I don't really think of the asbestos as being nearly the problem the rest of the toxic soup presented. A great many of the rescue workers have been debilitated for some time now from respiratory problems. What EPA will have no numbers on is the cumulative impact of the many toxins people were exposed to during that time. Asbestos may develop into a problem years from now, but people are already sick.

Still, it shouldn't have been necessarily for anyone to tell anyone else that the air they were breathing at Ground Zero was particularly unhealthy. Common sense would have told them that even if they didn't know the specific toxins they were exposed to. Firefighters have certainly always known that.

 

[Goshawk]

Well, "the government's refusal to tell anyone" at the time--in the days following 9/11--was IMO perfectly understandable. It's human nature to want to get back to normal as soon as possible after a disaster, and if they had notified the public that there was asbestos in the air, there would have been another wave of panic, which on top of what was already going on, New York just didn't need.

Found this, which incidentally dates from October of 2001. This Cate Jenkins, and the Post, are a day late and a dollar short, if they think they're breaking a news story--they're not.

http://www.junkscience.com/oct01/wsj-Strassel.htm

October 19, 2001

The EPA Comes Clean on Asbestos
By Kimberley A. Strassel, an assistant features editor at the Journal. Her OpinionJournal.com column appears on alternate Thursdays.

No more than a few hours after the World Trade Center fell, the media were reporting that the north tower had contained 40 floors of asbestos, all of which was now swirling around downtown Manhattan. City health officials, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and, most importantly, the Environmental Protection Agency, landed on the scene to conduct air-quality tests. What they did next was nothing less than astonishing: They said it was safe to be downtown.

For anyone who knows the history of these agencies, such proclamations are akin to heresy. For decades, the EPA has taken the lead in zero-tolerance policies toward any "carcinogenic" substance unlucky enough to have caught its eye -- whether it be pesticides, Hudson River PCBs or asbestos. This draconian approach has served to encourage unfounded health scares, and created an environment in which people no longer make rational decisions about health risks. It has also led to the nightmare of trial lawyers, lawsuits and corporate bankruptcies.

But on Sept. 11, as with so many things, the EPA's world changed. Faced with a public health scare that could have sent thousands in Manhattan fleeing the city or jamming hospitals, the EPA decided to cough up the truth about asbestos. Its officials bent over backward to get out the message that asbestos was harmful only if breathed at high levels and over sustained periods of time. When reporters pointed out that some of the tests had exceeded the EPA's safety levels, the agency hurried to explain that this was a "stringent standard based on long-term exposure" and repeated that the public was not at any real risk... [more]

Bottom line: evidently asbestos isn't that directly carcinogenic.

 

[Rolfe]

Unfortunately, it requires only one fibre of asbestos to cause a mesothelioma. This was the reason some victims lost out on compensation, because it was only one fibre that was causing the mesothelioma, and they couldn't prove which of their several asbestos-using employers had provided that particular fibre.

It's just Russian roulette. Obviously the more you play it the more likely you are to die. But you can get unlucky with your first shot.

I suppose that makes my father lucky. He worked with asbsetos when he was in his 20s, in the 1920s. He never touched the stuff after the late 20s, as he changed professions. He died of mesothelioma at the age of 85, 60 years post exposure.

Lots of people weren't nearly that lucky.

Rolfe.

 

[aerocontrols]

thanks, all.