America's Mayor "Never Meaningfully Enforced" Respirator Rules For Ground Zero Workers - NYT

[hatrack]

EDIT

An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers. “The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/nyregion/14giuliani.html

[demigoddess]

1. every time i hear anyone talking about terrorists and ground zero mess

I get really POed because if we had only rescued people, cleaned up the mess while keeping our 'first responders' safe from the toxic air in Manhattan, been serious about rebuilding and supporting the businesses affected by the attack, instead of treating our own people badly in order to run off to war and occupy Iraq, I think we would have proved to the world what a strong country we are and how great a democracy is. Instead we have weakened ourselves and made democratic government look as bad as dictatorships, which is no way to convince other countries that democracy is the way to go.