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Registration To Begin For EPA's Next Cleaning By Etta Sanders Downtown residents who are worried about residual World Trade Center dust will get one last chance to have their homes tested and cleaned, the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced. The plan, almost identical to one that was announced by the agency to widespread criticism a year ago, will cover the area below Canal Street and west of Allen Street. A 60-day registration will begin in mid-January 2007. (For more information go to www.epa.gov/wtc/testandclean.) The EPA said if one or more of four contaminants—lead, asbestos, man-made vitreous fiber, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons —are found to exceed acceptable levels, the agency will provide free cleaning. The EPA said the plan, capped at a budget of $7 million, is intended to ease ongoing concerns. “We hope the program will provide peace of mind to residents,” said Alan Steinberg, EPA Regional Administrator in a telephone press conference with reporters, later adding, “We are proceeding in good faith to address the concerns of those who live and work here.” But EPA official also said they don’t expect to find much. “Because the vast majority of residences and commercial spaces have been repeatedly cleaned,” said George Gray, Assistant Administration for Research and Development, “The potential for exposure to dust from the World Trade Center is low.” Elected officials and environmental groups, as well as the agency’s own expert technical review panel, criticized the original plan when it was first announced nearly a year ago. They said the testing covered too few contaminants, the geographic area was too narrow, and the program should have covered commercial spaces, too. Proponents of a more widespread program advocated for testing on the Lower East Side and into Brooklyn where the Sept. 11 dust plume traveled. The current plan has been modified to address some of that criticism. Owners of commercial buildings will now be able to request testing and residences that were previously tested and cleaned by the EPA can be tested again. Commercial tenants and their employees cannot register for testing, however. "We know that people are sick, and yet the agency is repeating the same mistakes by limiting the plan to a small geographic area, not testing for all contaminants known to be present in WTC dust, not treating buildings as a whole to reduce recontamination, and by refusing to take responsibility for commercial buildings,” said Rep. Jerold Nadler in a statement issued immediately after the EPA announcement. “The fact that they're only spending $7 million shows that EPA doesn't intend to do too much." Last year, the EPA’s expert technical review panel had recommended that a “signature dust” be identified and used for sampling in a wide geographic area in order to determine if there is in fact still World Trade Center dust in homes and workplaces. The EPA rejected that idea after a peer review group said it was impossible to conclusively identify contaminants as having come from the World Trade Center collapse. At the urging of panel members, the EPA said, they have spent the past year reexamining the possibility of a signature dust and again concluded that it was not feasible. In 2002 and 2003 the EPA tested and cleaned 4,200 apartments in a similar voluntary program covering the same area. During that program, Steinberg said, only about one percent of residences tested in the area exceeded the benchmark levels of contaminants. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a consistent critic of the EPA’s handling of the environmental impact from the towers’ collapse, said she will use her chairmanship of the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health to pursue a more expansive testing plan. "The EPA has now acknowledged that additional testing is necessary, but the program announced today is totally inadequate,” she said in a Dec. 6 statement.
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