Clearing the Air - 9/11's toxic dust - Village Voice

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Clearing the Air
9/11's toxic dust obscures answers about cancer and other health claims
by Graham Rayman

To understand how deeply New Yorkers hold the conviction that 9/11 environmental fallout is killing people, you need only to have attended the August 21 public meeting that was held in a chamber across from City Hall.

The topic was the disastrous August 18 fire in the heavily contaminated Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, which killed two firefighters. Only three weeks before the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks, here were city, state, and federal officials once again trying to downplay the possibility that the fire released environmental toxins into the neighborhood.

But the air was so thick with skepticism from the crowd that the assertions couldn't gain any traction. One resident described the debacle as a "religious kind of shame." Marc Ameruso, a lower-Manhattan community-board member, said, "The ghost of the World Trade Center is rearing its ugly head once again."

It was hard to blame the doubters. The Bush, Pataki, and Giuliani administrations have either misled or poorly informed the public about the toxic dangers of what has been described "as the largest acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City."

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