City to Pre-monitor Air Around WTC Site By Barry Owens The Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, the agency that over the next decade will coordinate truck traffic, enforce environmental regulations and otherwise aim to ease the damaging effect of constant construction in the neighborhood, will begin the task this month by first monitoring the quality of the air. An air quality monitoring program, which will include taking daily samples from several locations below Canal Street, will begin by the end of this month with the installation of sampling devices near the sites of major construction projects. Charles Maikish, the command center's director, presented a broad outline of the program on June 6 to a committee of Community Board 1. "The goal is to make sure that the air in Lower Manhattan is as good as it is anywhere else in Manhattan," he said. The devices are similar to the air quality monitors, and are meant to supplement, those to be set up on site during the deconstruction of Duetsche Bank, Fiterman Hall and other projects. The exact locations of the devices have not be determined, Maikish said, but the planned vicinities of the air monitors are in locations in both northern and southern Battery Park City, in southern Tribeca, on Park Row near City Hall Park and within the Financial District. The devices will test for particulates in the air and the analysis of the samples will determine in most cases where the matter emanates from. "We will be able to tell whether it is related to construction, or weather patterns, or even ship movement in the harbor," Maikish said. "If there is a spike in the readings, we have to determine why. If we determine that a contractor is not complying with environmental criteria, they will be shut down, period." That criteria includes the use of ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel in off-road construction equipment, restricting idling times on diesel powered engines and dust control measures at construction sites. The results of the daily samples will be published weekly, sent to various agencies and posted on lowermanhattan.info. Maikish said he expects construction in the neighborhood to be most heavy in 2007 and 08, but he is eager to have the air sampling devices up now so a baseline can be determined. The program will be overseen by the command center in consultation with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the city's Department of Environmental Protection.