A year after the collapse of the World Trade Center on
September 11, scientists and physicians in New York City are
still trying to figure out what tens of thousands of people
inhaled that day. Christie Whitman, head of the
Environmental Protection Agency, says there is nothing to
worry about, but New York politicians Jerrold Nadler, Hillary
Clinton and Chuck Schumer don't agree.
911 was not only an air pollution disaster for lower
Manhattan, it affected Brooklyn too, in areas where half the
2.5 million residents there live. NASA space photographs
show that the black, toxic cloud of World Trade Center debris
blew for more than 30 hours directly from Ground Zero to
the East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn
and Queens. Until Ground Zero fires finally burned out in
early December, prevailing winds carried smoke and fumes
along the same path every day.
Despite this, all health and stress surveys conducted by the
New York Academy of Medicine, the EPA, the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, and the state and city health
departments of New York have been limited to Manhattan.
The number of people who have been ruled eligible for
federal services as a result of exposure to the 9-11 pollution
in Brooklyn is, according to Dr. Marc Wilkenfeld of the
Columbia University Health Sciences Division, "exactly
none."
New York Rep. Nadler, who kept receiving complaints about
the pollution pouring across the East River, says, "In January
I said, 'Get a satellite photo. See where the plume went.'
And the EPA said, 'There are no satellite photos.' And when I
saw the NASA photos in Newsday six months later, I was
livid because I was lied to."
"That is not true," EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow
says. "He was not told that. We would have no reason to tell
the congressman that they didn't exist when they did."
Paul Lioy heads up a team of scientists who are trying to
determine precisely what was in the plume of debris and
smoke, and where it all fell day by day. They collected dust
samples from three lower Manhattan locations on September
12 and submitted them to a series of tests, from electron
microscope scrutiny to gas chromatography. "This was a very
horrendous air-pollution event," Lioy says. "The tremendous
crush of all this material was horrific. You had dust, smoke,
fires, fumes, the remnants of those tragic planes. It was a
very complex event, unlike anything we or anybody else has
ever seen."
There were thousands of windows in the 110 stories of the
twin towers that exploded into invisible, microscopic
projectiles. The dust samples contained large amounts of
microscopic glass fibers, most of them less than a micron in
diameter and more than 75 microns long?small enough to
pierce human lungs. "The glass fiber was a surprise to
everybody," Lioy says. "It was one of those things that we
never anticipated."
The team was also surprised to find that the content of the
pollution varied based on the distance from the towers.
Samples collected one block from the World Trade Center on
Cortlandt Street were composed of pulverized concrete,
glass, unburned or partially burned jet fuel, and construction
materials. Samples collected on Market Street, half mile from
the site, contained less concrete but three times more
asbestos. Heavy metals like zinc, strontium, lead and
aluminum also increased with distance, as well as PCBs.
The area immediately around the World Trade Center got hit
with the heaviest substances, like pulverized concrete, steel,
office equipment, cars and construction material. But the
tremendous heat produced by the jet-fueled inferno created
an updraft that lifted lighter pollutants and gases upward,
towards the East River. It was a sunny day, so the chemicals
in the cloud were affected by strong ultraviolet radiation.
Most organic chemicals are altered by UV light, and some are
transformed into compounds that are more toxic to human
beings, so as the cloud drifted, it became more lethal.
Not much is known about the content of the debris that
reached Brooklyn because nobody ever collected samples
there. However, Dr. Tucker Woods was running the
emergency room of Long Island College Hospital on
September 11 when he got a huge influx of respiratory
cases. "I personally this year have seen a real increase in
asthma complaints and chronic bronchitis," Woods says.
Dr. Walfred Leon conducted a study of police officers who
worked at Ground Zero and experienced respiratory
problems. Although most of them had been young, healthy
adults, many got severe respiratory problems that required
hospitalization. "We've never encountered anything like this
before in medicine," Leon says. He thinks World Trade Center
Cough may be a new disease.
WTC Cough is characterized by reduced lung capacity and a
hyper-reactivity of the airways to all particles, bacteria and
viruses that are inhaled. The patient has a dry,
nonproductive cough that leaves him gasping for air. Their
airways recoil from microscopic foreign objects, becoming
tightly constricted.
At first, researchers feared there would be many future cases
of asbestosis, where exposure to asbestos causes incurable
lung cancer decades later (the actor Steve McQueen died
from this). However, there was little asbestos in the twin
towers because the city health department stopped its use in
the World Trade Center construction during an early stage,
and less toxic substances were used for insulation on all the
upper floors.
Dr. Sonia Buist, of Oregon Health Sciences, has spent years
studying the impact of the 1980 eruption of the Mt. St.
Helens volcano on the lungs of loggers who worked on the
mountain for half a decade afterwards. The ash they inhaled,
like the World Trade Center debris, was very high in natural
volcanic ground glass about the same size as the WTC dust
samples.
While the loggers Buist studied experienced lung irritation,
most of them eventually regained full health when the
particles were finally cleared from their lungs. The human
lung has a mechanism called the "mucous escalator," in
which irritating particles trigger an immune response,
causing mucous to surround the particles, which are then
coughed up. But Buist says glass fibers coated with
chemicals are harder for the mucous escalator to clear from
the lungs. Lioy's electron microscope studies showed that all
glass fibers from Ground Zero were chemically coated with
human cell fragments, lead or fungi.
"There is no precedent for this," says Wilkenfeld. "This is a
new experience for all of us, and we are learning as we go
along."
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