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• [1] Maggie Clarke, Ph.D. from Inwood, Manhattan August 27, 2007 - 10:43AM

  Part 1 of 2.

  I'm curious to know if you are going to have a new panel to discuss what we have and have not learned about how to sample, analyze and report on toxic substances in the air and dust after an incident like this. We also haven't learned how to take this information and decide on evacuations (where are people supposed to go)? Perhaps most important, we have not learned the Precautionary Principle, and after the steampipe explosion and the fire at Deutsche Bank, the knee jerk response from the officials was to REASSURE. Once you have said there is no danger, you are in a big hole of liability from which you can't get out. The WTC health registry began Two Years after 9/11. You ask people detailed questions 2 years after an incident and your data is garbage. One can argue that the administration, having boxed itself into a corner the moment Administrator Whitman started to repeat that the air is safe to breathe, did not want to find out that there are health consequences from bad planning and bad decisions. From my perspective, having taught the science of the air quality to downtown residents starting as early as late 2001, and having testified on it to city, state and federal officials, we have learned only a little about emergency response to environmental disasters.

  
  
• [2] Maggie Clarke, Ph.D. from Inwood, Manhattan August 27, 2007 - 10:52AM

  Part 2 of 2

  Today you wondered why Rove and Gonzalez resigned now. The obvious answer: It’s August. The press and everybody else is asleep. EPA's Inspector General released a report in August 2003 saying that the White House Council on Env. Quality changed Whitman's early press releases to be certain that there was no health problem, the same as the White House erased certain words from the Climate Change report some years back. How many people remember this report at all. The government still aims to reassure rather than protect. What to do now? The press needs to do a better job educating itself and then the citizens about the science of air quality, otherwise, they will not have the tools to question all the reassurances that governments will continue to provide.

  I hope you will read some of the published reports, testimony and other documents I have written about the environmental consequences of 9/11 on my website: http://geography.hunter.cuny.edu/~mclarke/MaggieClarke/WorldTradeCenterAirQuality.htm

  One document, “Bad Decisions”, by me and 9/11 Environmental Action, show all the decisions made by agencies, companies, and individuals that caused unnecessary exposures to WTC dust and smoke, all resulting from “The Air Is Safe To Breathe” statement that everyone remembers. Another is a peer-reviewed, published document on how EPA should have sampled, analyzed and cleaned up the interiors of buildings after 9/11.