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Anatomy of the 9/11 Risk-Communication Fiasco
By Francesca Lyman
SEJournal (Society of Environmental Journalists)
November 2004
http://www.sej.org/pub/index4.htm
[For an archive of articles and documents concerning 9/11-related occupational and environmental safety and health, visit http://www.nycosh.org/environment_wtc/WTC-catastrophe.html]
Sept. 11, 2001, awakened Americans to the horrors of terrorism. The images of terror are still vivid, even a few years later. That day, too, the nation also witnessed a new kind of horror, although most people didn't realize it at the time: An environmental health emergency — as well as a communications fiasco in reporting it. With few exceptions, the major media failed to warn the public of the dangers in the smoke and dust following the building collapses. More importantly, the government's communications to the public deliberately downplayed environmental concerns, according to recent investigations, casting a harsh light on what can happen in a terrorist attack.
When the World Trade Center and a wedge of the Pentagon came crashing down on Sept. 11, the rubble left for rescuers and cleanup crews was laced with asbestos, heavy metals, diesel fuel, PCBs and dozens of other poisons. New York City was enveloped in a cloud of smoke, soot and toxic ash, and the fires at ground zero fumed for months, making it the longest commercial fire and one of the worst industrial work sites in history. Immediately the public clamored for advice. But how good was the environmental and health information in the wake of the disaster?
According to a watchdog investigation that grabbed headlines in the days leading up to the second anniversary of 9/11, the public didn't get enough information and what information it did get was misleading.
What's more, the findings of the inspector general of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency demonstrate that White House officials pressured the agency to downplay the dangers to the public in the first few days after the attack, some observers say.
In her investigation into official statements about air quality after the collapse of the World Trade Center, released Aug. 21, 2003, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley says the agency "did not have sufficient data and analyses" to make a "blanket statement" when it announced seven days after the attack that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.
The report cited other competing considerations, such as "reopening Wall Street" and "national security" as reasons for the spin.[1] At the same time, "the public did not receive sufficient air quality information and wanted more information on health risks," the inspector general found.[2]
The agency's watchdog arm followed up with a second, separate report that received less attention than the first. In it, the inspector general conducted a survey of some 10,000 New York City residents regarding government communications, and found that most people surveyed "wanted more information regarding outdoor and indoor air quality, wanted this information in a timelier manner and did not believe the information they received."[3]
According to the survey, 81.8 percent of respondents (about 12 percent of those polled) were dissatisfied with information about outdoor air quality, and 84.8 percent were dissatisfied with information about indoor air quality. At the same time, the survey found sizable majorities of New Yorkers who "perceived" both short-term and long-term health risks from breathing air — indoor and out.
In the agency's defense, then acting EPA administrator Marianne Horinko said that EPA, along with other agencies, was only acting on "available data" and its best professional judgments at the time.[4] Furthermore, there was nothing improper in the White House influencing EPA press releases, concluded the Republican controlled Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. After Senate Democrats on the committee threatened to block the Bush administration pick to head EPA during confirmation hearings unless an investigation was mounted, this committee stepped in with an "oversight report" concluding that the agency was at no fault in its response or communications.[5]
That, of course, didn't end the controversy. EPA's 9/11 report remained a lightning rod in fall 2003 and a debating point in the 2004 Presidential election campaign.
Several legislators continued to press the White House for answers. "If EPA's 'Lessons Learned' report documents deceit and neglect within the Agency, then the American people deserve to know about it," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the congressman in whose district Ground Zero lies, in an Oct. 15 press release. Nadler, an early critic of the agency on this issue, and other legislators have filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for more data on communications between the White House and EPA.
"EPA's decisions after the terrorist attacks have a direct impact on the health and lives of New Yorkers," charged Nadler. "Two years later the EPA still fails to answer questions from the public, including who at the White House was involved in doctoring public statements regarding air quality following the attacks and why the EPA still refuses to clean up indoor spaces contaminated with WTC dust."[6]
Many New Yorkers and observers of the issue came to feel — and continue to feel — that the government misled the public, prompting the press to leave the subject alone, and causing a buildup of public distrust. Thousands of workers and residents still suffer respiratory ailments from breathing the contaminated air.[7] So how the government responded two years ago is more than just an academic question.
In the heat and smoke of the moment, should the agencies' messages have been more precautionary? If so, what were the factors leading to failures in communicating? What lessons are there in this episode for the future, in the ugly event of another terrorist attack or some other disaster?
The World Trade Center is often seen as a symbol of wealth and power. As an icon, it also functioned as a symbol of communication. With its antenna thrust upwards — 1,368 feet, or more than a quarter of a mile — into the sky, the taller skyscraper, 1 World Trade Center, was once the tallest building on the East Coast, making it an ideal site for communications transmission.[8] From a distance, one might even say it resembled a giant cell phone.
All of New York City's TV stations used the legendary 351-foot antenna of that soaring building, as did many radio stations. Tower 1 and its twin housed a virtual forest of other antennas — 98 in all — on nearly an acre of rooftop, serving a wide range of networks — particularly those centered on public safety — before they went dead that fateful morning on Sept. 11, 2001.
So when the towers came crashing down, communications and information about the crisis became critical commodities, especially when it came to public health and safety. Kelly McKinney, associate commissioner for Regulatory and Environmental Health Services for the New York City Department of Health (DOH) got off the subway, just after the first plane had hit the South Tower, to find his building being evacuated and his cell phone useless. "The technology you rely on most will fail first!" he says.[9] He soon learned that the city's state of the art emergency command center had also been destroyed.
Tragically, police and fire officials and emergency personnel were unable to communicate with each other. A New Jersey volunteer fire fighter, Glenn Corbett, for example, recounted sadly watching his colleagues desperately trying to send emergency messages mounting rescue operations inside the Twin Towers. "It was such a tragedy to see the battalion chief of the first battalion and the first fire chief on the scene of the Trade Center trying to communicate with other officers up in the building and we saw on national television...He kept calling and calling and there was no answer," he said.[10]
Even though the city's complete communications infrastructure, as well as its command center, had been destroyed, public health and environmental agencies had to arrive on the scene and render quick "size-ups." McKinney's first response was to send out trouble-shooters to test for biological, chemical and radioactive threats. "Their primary direction was to be the Department's eyes on the scene, and to communicate to us detailed descriptions of emerging health hazards," McKinney says.[11]
Coordinating communication among agencies was a "huge challenge for us," EPA's Horinko admitted, reflecting on the events two years later.[12] During the first 24 hours, local environmental health department professionals and others faced unprecedented challenges, including mountains of dust and debris containing mostly pulverized cement, fiberglass, glass, and building materials, including as yet unknown and varying amounts of toxic metals, burning plastics and fuels, not to mention smoke and fumes from the building fires.
Yet one of the city's first decisions was to declare lower Manhattan and the ground zero area environmentally "safe" — only seven days later.
"Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink," declared then EPA administrator Christie Whitman. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that tests of air and water had turned up "no significant problems."[13]
Three months later, fires still burned and smoldered beneath the World Trade Center wreckage, releasing high levels of benzene, an organic compound that can lead to leukemia, bone marrow damage and other diseases after long-term exposure, as well as other toxic compounds, such as dioxin.[14] Besides this, the dust created by the initial building collapse and the debris being trucked out — most of it potentially laden with asbestos — was brought through open doors and windows, through ventilation systems and tracked in on shoes, into homes, offices and schools in the area.
Although the official word was that ordinary citizens were at no real risk from being in contact with the ash and dust remains of the trade towers, some recognized the unique issues immediately and urged greater precautions. After all, Ground Zero was a disaster site like no other — with hazards everywhere. Shards of steel lay upon shards of steel, shifting and unstable, uncovering red hot metal beams excavated from deep beneath layers of subfloors, exposing further dark crevasses. All around the 16-acre site lay millions of piles of debris, covered in dust, with noxious smoke smoldering up, carrying unknown toxins, from benzene to heavy metals, into surrounding neighborhoods.
The New York Environmental Law and Justice Project (NYELJP), an advocacy group, was one of several groups that began taking samples of the dust and debris to do its own independent tests and found toxins like asbestos and fiberglass at higher levels than the government was reporting. Within several weeks, too, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), began seeing workers turning up with asthma and respiratory problems, and urged rescue workers who worked for prolonged periods to be cautious of the dust.
"Many of the workers involved in the World Trade Center recovery and clean-up operation have received safety and health training, but many other workers will be facing hazards that are unfamiliar, with the potential to cause serious illness, injury or death," wrote Jonathan Bennett, communications director for NYCOSH, in one of several fact-sheets released starting Sept. 21.[15]
[NOTE ADDED BY NYCOSH: This article is in error when it states that NYCOSH began to warn workers and residents of the hazard in Lower Manhattan after "seeing workers turning up with asthma and respiratory problems." NYCOSH began to warn workers about the hazard on 9/12, based on knowledge of the materials that had been in the collapsed buildings. The article also mistakenly attributes NYCOSH 9/11-related factsheets to one NYCOSH staff member. The factsheets were produced by the staff as a whole.]
These groups worked to identify exposed populations, especially the undocumented and day laborers and the uninsured, and to get information to the public, along with other organizations, such as the Mount Sinai-Irving J. Selikoff Clinical Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mt. Sinai also recognized the vacuum in communication. "Many offices and apartments were coated with dust that came in through shattered windows or inadequately protected air handling systems," wrote Landrigan. "One piece of bright news is that many office buildings with alert maintenance staffs rapidly shut down their air intake systems on 11 September and thus kept out much of the dust. Residential buildings, where staff were fewer in number and generally less well trained, fared less well."[16]
In this confusing climate, the city department of health was besieged by phone calls from residents and others. The Health Department was not quite as definite as EPA's Whitman had been. While encouraging people to move back to their homes and restore their lives to normalcy, it urged citizens to take precautions with dust and ash, Sandra Mullin of the city's Department of Health told MSNBC Online, "to protect people with underlying respiratory problems." The agency advised "simple housekeeping tips like removing shoes, keeping windows closed and changing filters in air conditioners."[17]
Among the general public, however, concerns over smoke and dust didn't really erupt until weeks after EPA and Mayor Giuliani had declared the area safe to return to, when, sometime in October 2001, community newspapers began reporting local disgruntlement and confusion.[18] Low-income people living in areas like Chinatown didn't even have computers to visit the websites city officials promoted.
Behind the scenes, too, experts were critical. In a series of memos critical of EPA's response to 9/11, government whistleblower Cate Jenkins, a senior chemist in the EPA's hazardous waste division, argued that asbestos levels in lower Manhattan were high enough to declare the entire area a Superfund site. She compared dust samples drawn from New York apartments in an independent study with similar samples drawn from houses in Libby, Mont., a small town designated as a Superfund site after a surrounding vermiculite mine released deadly asbestos fibers into the air.
Questions continued to bubble up. In December, for example, Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg faced the quandary of whether to allow residents' dust-contaminated cars to be returned to them. At first, the city health commissioner had said they could be potentially contaminated and therefore unsafe to return to their owners. Then the agency flip-flopped and told car owners they could pick them up at the landfill, giving them specific instructions on HEPA vacuuming them.
Some officials monitoring air, water and soil admitted that pollutants did "climb to hazardous levels" on occasion. "The further you get from the site, the data does not demonstrate significant risks to people," William J. Muszynski, acting regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told a reporter for CNN. "I think you can sensationalize — I mean, I think you can look at the numbers, a spike, and believe that number is overly significant," Muszynski said. "Most of what we do is based on long-term exposure."[19]
By December, The Wall Street Journal ran a Page 1 story describing growing public fears about air quality and indoor dust. "In the weeks since Sept. 11, government agencies testing the air near ground zero have reached a nearly unanimous conclusion: There is no significant long-term health risk for area workers and residents. Yet hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people who live, work or go to school in lower Manhattan have experienced persistent sore throats and hacking coughs. Area physicians report a surge in new or worsened asthma cases: How to explain the contradiction?"[20]
Health and environmental issues should have drawn more attention, but their full impacts didn't emerge until too late — at least four weeks late.[21] That failure in communication set the stage for little news coverage, especially since national news outlets were already stepping up foreign news.[22]
At first, the media least concerned with reporting on the environmental impacts were the local New York City papers, according to journalist Susan Stranahan, writing in the American Journalism Review.[23]
"Not since the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania have reporters and government officials faced such an Everest-size task of communicating complex information to a frightened public," wrote Stranahan. "All too often after 9/11, however, journalists simply accepted the party line from city, state and federal officials. With a few notable exceptions, the New York media took months to zero in on a story that touched the lives of thousands."
The first to report on the environmental health aspects of the disaster was not The New York Times but national outlets such as Newsweek, MSNBC, CNN, and others.[24] The first local reporter to flag discrepancies between official statements about health risks and independent studies showing otherwise, however, was Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez.[25] On October 26, 2001, Gonzalez obtained internal government reports showing that toxic chemicals and metals were released into the environment by the fiery collapse of the twin towers.[26]
The media, by and large, focused on other, "bigger" themes related to terrorism, everything from the cultural and geopolitical issues surrounding the attacks — Islam and the Middle East; the immediate economic dislocation; the search and rescue operations; the process of criminal investigations and the suspects. In a paper on the patterns of media coverage of the terrorist attacks, Christine Rodrigue,[27] a geographer at California State University, identifies ten main themes — and environment is not even one of them.
That's surprising considering, at least on the local level, the physical environment around the World Trade Center had changed drastically — from giant piles of rubble strewn everywhere to trucks hauling debris to empty buildings and displaced residents and the fact that it was difficult to breathe.
Two years later, some of those closest to the event concede that need for better risk communication was one of the biggest lessons learned from the events of 9/11. Kelly McKinney at the city health department admitted that his department needed to communicate what they knew "every day and all day long." He added, "If it is a hazard, be clear about what you know and don't know — and where the uncertainty lies."[28]
Some scientists now criticize the agencies for letting people come back to lower Manhattan so quickly. This was a chaotic time, but there was no basis for the city and federal government to state that the environment was safe to reinhabit so quickly, says Paul Lioy, professor of environmental and community medicine at Rutgers University. "People came back, but they never should have been allowed to be back," says Lioy. "No one should have been back at work. Children should definitely have not been back in school."[29]
So far the White House has issued no response to the Democrats' call for further investigation into who directed the EPA to assure New Yorkers that there was no health threat posed by the air pollution created by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Others point the finger beyond EPA.
"I wish that the public health leadership had stepped up and added some health perspective during the first few months, when there was so much uncertainty about the dangers in the dust," says Dr. Steven Markowitz, a professor of community health and social medicine at the City University of New York Medical School, in Flushing, N.Y. "It should not have just been left to the environmental experts to communicate the need for precautions."[30]
Congressman Nadler and other advocates in downtown New York say they feel vindicated by the EPA inspector general's two reports and are glad they were finally released. But Nadler points out that while EPA has now vowed to do a better job of risk communicating in the future, the agency has refused to solve the glaring failing identified in the IG report: A full cleanup of the dust in New York, as required under presidential directive after a terrorist incident.
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