E.P.A. Is Urged to Widen Focus on 9/11 Health Effects - New York Times:
"Speaking at a Congressional hearing held in Brooklyn Borough Hall, they said that with the recent focus on the deaths and illnesses of people who worked at the World Trade Center disaster site, effects on those farther from ground zero were being overlooked.
Several experts presented evidence that they had gathered in recent years of increased asthma rates and widespread home contamination in Brooklyn, and urged more research to at least determine the extent of the problems.
Representative Jerrold L. Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, said that having already misled ground zero workers that the air they breathed was safe, the E.P.A. was now engaged in a “second cover-up.”
“This,” Mr. Nadler said, “is that the people in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Queens are still being poisoned daily.”
The hearing was conducted by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform and was presided over by Representative Edolphus Towns, a Democrat of Brooklyn.
In the hours and days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, aerial photographs showed the main plume of smoke and dust blanketing a northwest-to-southeast swath of Brooklyn.
The E.P.A. paid for apartment cleaning in some of the Manhattan neighborhoods closest to ground zero, and in 2005 it proposed expanding its clean-up zone to affected areas of western Brooklyn and farther north in Manhattan. But it dropped the plan after an independent panel rejected the agency’s proposed criteria for determining contamination.
At yesterday’s hearing, an official in the State Department of Health’s Office of Managed Care cited a study, which his office helped conduct in the summer of 2002, of Medicaid recipients with pre-existing asthma. The survey found that asthma sufferers in western Brooklyn were 2.4 times more likely to complain of worsened asthma after 9/11 than asthma sufferers in the rest of the city — more likely even than asthma sufferers in Lower Manhattan.
The survey also found that asthma sufferers in western Brooklyn were 1.5 times more likely to have visited a hospital for asthma complaints than those in the rest of the city, the health official, Patrick J. Roohan, said.
Yvonne J. Graham, the deputy borough president in Brooklyn, said that of the $140 million that the federal Department of Health and Human Services gave to health care organizations after the attacks, only $5.5 million went to Brooklyn, $4 million less than the Bronx, which was not in the path of the main plume.
Kwa-Cheung Chan, a former assistant inspector general at the E.P.A., said that in a 2003 survey conducted by his office, about a quarter of Brooklyn respondents said that their homes had been contaminated with dust or debris from 9/11. A survey by the Sierra Club in neighborhoods southeast of the Brooklyn Bridge, including Red Hook, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, found similar results, said Suzanne Y. Mattei, the club’s New York City executive.
“This is only preliminary information meant to indicate where further testing needs to be done,” Ms. Mattei said, “but it sure does follow the dust cloud.”
Representative Anthony D. Wiener, a Democrat from southern Brooklyn, recalled watching scraps of paper settling on the terrace of his office near the waterfront in Sheepshead Bay, nearly 10 miles from ground zero.
Bonnie Bellow, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A. in New York, said by telephone yesterday, “While we had a wide range of various kinds of data to indicate there certainly was some dust that went to Brooklyn, we have focused our program closest to ground zero.” The agency, she said, was “prioritizing the testing and the necessary cleanups” there.
Ms. Bellow said the agency had not been invited to attend yesterday’s hearing.
Mr. Chan said that five years down the road, it made more sense to examine people than their homes.
“It’s like when you dirty the water, a few years later you start to see mercury in the fish,” he said. “Why don’t we look at the fish rather than the water?”
But Ms. Mattei said that even at this late date, a cleanup could prevent health damage.
“There’s no World Trade Center dust left on the kitchen table,” Ms. Mattei said. “But what about the carpet, the curtains? I’m more concerned for young children and toddlers.”
She noted that even five years after what she said was an exhaustive effort to locate the remains of those who died on 9/11, they are still turning up on building rooftops and elsewhere.
“If the bones are still there,” Ms. Mattei said, “why do we assume that the asbestos and the lead are not?”
Correction: April 28, 2007
An article on Tuesday about a Congressional hearing in
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