Tenants Refute City's Cleanup Claims

By Ronald Drenger

Jeers rang out from Lower Manhattan residents in the otherwise quiet and attentive audience as the commissoner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) told a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Feb. 11, that his agency was diligent in overseeing the cleanup of buildings in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster.

At the hearing, conducted by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in the U.S. Customs House at Bowling Green, DEP commissoner Joel Miele said that his agency had properly guided and monitored indoor testing and cleanups. The city, he said, had required landlords to test for asbestos and other hazardous materials, to use qualified cleani ng services to deal with potentially hazardous dust, and to inspect, clean and repair ventilation systems.

"That did not happen!" one tenant yelled.

"They didn’t do it," another cried out.

The potential health risk from polluted World Trade Center dust inside apartment buildings is a top environmental concern for many downtown residents, who believe that their buildings have not been adequately tested or cleaned. Witnesses at the hearing attacked the city’s handling of potential health hazards inside buildings.

"The most worrisome air pollution problem facing Lower Manhattan now involves indoor pollution threats in some residences and offices that were engulfed with thick layers of contaminated dust and whose buildings were not properly cleaned," said Eric Goldstein, New York urban program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "City agencies failed to provide complete and proper clean-up protocols to many Lower Manhattan residents and failed to inspect even the most heavily contaminated buildings for environmental safety, prior to re-entry." No agency took responsibility for indoor cleanups and building inspections, he said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler criticized the federal Environmental Protection Agency for failing to protect public health by, among other things, "not exercising its full authority to test and clean all indoor spaces where people live and work."

"The EPA delegated authority to New York City to handle indoor environments, but did nothing to ensure that the City’s response was appropriate," he said. "The burden should not be on the landlords and residents themselves when the testing procedures and cleanup measures are expensive and must be conducted by properly trained personnel."

Elizabeth Berger, who lives with her husband and two young children on lower Broadway, 150 yards from Ground Zero, described the uncertainty facing downtown residents as they make decisions about how to clean up their apartments—or whether to even move back home.

"Some people in our building hired professional cleaners, others did it themselves, and a few locked their doors and didn’t come back for a while," she said. "We reluctantly made our own rules." Berger and her husband started cleaning up Trade Center dust in their apartment on their own, then had "eight guys in white suits and respirators" clean for five days.

"From a health perspective, there has been little guidance and fewer answers," she said. "No one, to this day, can agree on what clean means and how to measure it...No one tells you what to keep and what to toss."

The EPA’s administrator for the New York area, Jane Kenny, said her agency is "committed to helping residents and workers address issues of indoor air quality." And the DEP’s Miele said that residents with questions about whether their buildings were properly cleaned should call 718-DEP-HELP or his office, at 718-595-6565.

"If anyone fell through the cracks, we’d like to get at that," he said.

Various witnesses called for tougher government oversight of indoor testing and cleanups, with building-by-building inspections. Nadler said after his testimony that individual apartments and offices should be "systematically tested, followed by remediation where tests indicate the need, paid for by the federal government."

Clinton said she hoped to create a "World Trade Center indoor air program," with an indoor air quality task force, as part of a five-point plan to address Ground Zero environmental concerns.

Residents in the audience said that while they were encouraged by those recommendations, they continue to be angry and frustrated by lack of action in their buildings—especially after some independent tests, paid for by tenant associations, have shown what they say are unsafe levels of pollutants.

"There’s been no abatement in our building, 50 Battery Place," said Sudhir Jain, president of his building’s tenant association and head of the Lower Manhattan Tenants Coalition. "We don’t know what testing our landlord did, and our landlord has not cleaned one single apartment that we are aware of. It’s the government’s responsiblity to make sure the cleaning of buildings is sufficient."

"We’ve never seen any of the results that the DEP says it has," said Tammy Meltzer, tenant association co-president at the Gateway Plaza residential complex in Battery Park City. "In the meantime, there’s a good chance that children are jumping on dirty couches and crawling on contaminated floors."

"We’ll never rebuild our community until they can prove it’s healthy," Meltzer added. "If they do what it takes, then they can say, ‘Look how fabulous Lower Manhattan is.’ We don’t want to be part of a health study. We want people to feel safe."