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Air Today . . . Gone Tomorrow Article
9/11 Memo Reveals
Asbestos 'Cover-Up'
By Sam Smith, July 16, 2004
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.
The data, which Jenkins says she culled from state records, appear damning. On the day
after the attack, the memo claims, city test results from the corner of Centre and
Chambers streets and from the corner of Spruce and Gold streets showed asbestos
concentration at about twice the level considered safe by the EPA.
The city did not release this information to the public, Jenkins says.
The next day, Sept. 13, city tests were "overloaded" with asbestos in the air
so much that the lab could not conclude precise amounts along Church Street.
Again, the information was withheld, the memo claims.
When the city published the test results for the weeks following 9/11 on its Web site in
February 2002, there were 17 instances where the data was either understated or left
blank, Jenkins asserts in her report.
"New York City could wiggle out of the [claim of] concealment, because they weren't
making any explicit statements about data at the time," Jenkins told The Post.
"But the EPA can't wiggle out of this. They said the air was safe at the same time
they were coordinating data with the city."
To drive her point home, Jenkins compares statements made by the EPA on the same day test
data was showing dangerous levels of asbestos. On Sept. 18, then-EPA administrator
Christie Whitman said the public in lower Manhattan was not being exposed to
"excessive levels of asbestos."
That same day, city testing data, some of which was later made public, showed asbestos
levels 50 percent higher and more above what her agency considers safe, the memo states.
Copyright 2003 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
http//www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/25149.htm
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