About time
Imagine this: It's taken over four years and who knows how many bucks before a federal judge in New York City has cleared the air — no pun intended — that city residents were misled about air quality after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Judge Deborah Batts in the federal district court in Manhattan specifically said that Christy Todd Whitman , when she led the EPA, made "misleading statements of safety" about air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the terrorist attack and may have put the public in danger.
The ruling, according to the New York Times, came during a hearing on whether a class action suit on behalf of residents and school children from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn may proceed. The suit says not only were people exposed to contaminated air but the agency failed to carry out an adequate cleanup of nearby buildings.
The judge criticized Whitman and the EPA for putting out leaflets assuring people that the air in lower Manhattan was relatively safe and there were no significant levels of asbestos dust in the air.
The Times goes on to report that about 2,000 tons of asbestos was released into the air along with 424,000 tons of concrete when the buildings came down.
These shenanigans in New York City went on while the EPA was making Libby its top priority for cleanup of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite — the very same vermiculite used in the Monokote fireproofing manufactured by W.R. Grace and used on the steel of the World Trade Center.
New York area EPA people have been out here to study the clean-up methods used in Libby homes. New York emergency medical people have seen the human devastation here caused by exposure to tremolite asbestos found in the vermiculite from the old W.R. Grace mine. And several New York specialists are working with the Center for Asbestos Related Disease.
It's one thing to worry about causing a wholesale panic among millions of people already in shock about the attack, the human loss and the collapse of two U.S. icons. But to tell a lie out in the open in which the truth is sitting there for all to see, well that might be unconscionable.
New York City is supposed to be the media capital of the world with five major daily newspapers, magazines and electronic media. Where were they when the air was proclaimed clean. Of course, at the time Libby vermiculite was the least of their worries with the horrendous witches brew of toxins released in the air by the trade center's collapse. But now the tremolite will weigh heavily on the government as millions of people wonder, or perhaps a civil court jury, what their exposure brings in 20-40 years.
An interesting sidebar about this civil suit is that Whitman and the EPA are being represented in court by Department of Justice attorneys - the same agency going after W.R. Grace on criminal charges in federal court here in Montana. That's going to be interesting. — Roger Morris