Who was the medical expert, if any, relied upon by the county commissioner, and how could the safety of the air have possibly been tested so quickly?
Y'all remember how the EPA's inital report of unsafe air on and around Ground Zero was rewritten at the direction of James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Director of the White House Office of Environmental Policy from 2001 to 2009? I knew Connaughton's parents in Lutherville, Maryland. His psychiatrist dad, on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, was so proud of his son "being in charge of the environment" for Bush. What was most egregiously offensive about Connaughton's over-riding Whitman at the EPA re air safety, was that his background was in asbestos defense litigation, so he well knew the carcinogenic effects of asbestos. He knew exactly and in great medical detail the agonizing, lingering deaths suffered by people with mesothelioma. I have worked on asbestos cases, which involved sitting at deathbed depositions - you don't know what agony is until you've seen the suffering of mesothelioma vicims.
Bush/Chaney were desperate to get the stock market/Wall Street up and running again immediately. So New Yorkers who worked or lived in the area were assured no worries - move back in. Just as the responders/clean up workers on Ground Zero were also put to work. In fact, the work spaces/schools/apartments/etc., particularly including the air ventilation systems at those places should have been cleaned out, but weren't.
A good account of this is provided by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/ground-zero-air-pollution.html#.VUtnVvCnaDE
World Trade Center Rescue Workers Believed EPA, Ended Up Sick
The EPA was not given full control over its press releases in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Administrator Whitman issued a memo on September 12 announcing that "all statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC [National Security Council] before they are released,"5 and the New York Post reported that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was "the final decision maker" regarding the release of information by the EPA.6 In addition the OIG report details how the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) pressed the EPA to "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" from agency press releases. For example, information discussing the potential health risk for "sensitive populations" from exposure to particulate matter was discouraged from inclusion in a press release by a CEQ official (that official was asshole Connaughton), and language discussing detected levels of asbestos was softened.8 The involvement of NSC and CEQ officials raises questions as to whether public health concerns were trumped by political and security priorities.
Other news reports suggest that the EPA was not fully forthcoming about the air quality at ground zero. EPA scientist Cate Jenkins argues that the agency plainly lied in its public declarations. Jenkins told CBS News in September 2006 that the EPA knew "this dust was highly caustic, in some cases as caustic and alkaline as Drano."9 In September 2006, CNN reported that an October 5, 2001 letter from the EPA to the New York City Health Department warned of threats to worker safety from exposure to hazardous materials.10 Yet this knowledge failed to affect the EPA's unworried public statements.
The EPA's September 18, 2001 news release stated that "EPA's primary concern is to ensure that rescue workers and the public are not being exposed to elevated levels of potentially hazardous contaminants in the dust and debris."11 Yet despite this, a 2006 study by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York found that "seven out of ten World Trade Center rescue and wreckage workers had new or worsened lung problems after the attacks."12 The New York City Department of Health has a database of 71,000 people exposed to dust and debris at Ground Zero—a database created in response to hundreds of people's complaints of breathing and lung problems. The health of these individuals may have been saved if not for the government's willingness to place politics above sound science in the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
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