The Land of Oz in shock too!

by ozziepost 24 Replies latest jw friends

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  snowbird

  Snowbird- you scared the hell outa me - I thought it was happening again.

  Jeff

  Sorry about that, Jeff. Was going through the archives and came upon this.

  Sylvia
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  greendawn

  I was staying in a hotel in Strasbourg Eastern France at the time I had returned from a long walk in the old city centre and saw many people watching the TV in the lounge which was something unusual. Why so many? I asked and someone told me.
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  AK - Jeff

  I'm ok now Snowbird. I took some nitro. [only kidding]. It's all good now.

  Jeff
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  darth frosty

  Its amazing how we look back on what was going on back then. I remember I had just gotten off work the night shift and the big news here, was the benching of the lions QB. Now six years later the big news this morning is the lions actually won the season opener.
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  Tatiana

  I watched Flight 93 again last night. I still say that plane was shot down. I also watched a documentary last night on the aftermath of Sept 11. The many, many people who helped with the huge cleanup, and who are now diagnosed with leukemia, lung cancer, etc. With chemicals like benzine, lead, dioxin, titanium in the air, the EPA said it was safe.

  http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/toxiclegacy/index.html

  http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/toxiclegacy/index5.html

  At the White House, dust was not an issue on anyone's agenda that day . getting America back to normal was. President Bush told advisors that he wanted New York back in business – by the next day if possible. But with thousands missing, the first priority was the search for survivors. Senator Hillary Clinton was one of the observers who were uneasy about the effects of the foul air on the rescuers. "I saw the firefighters coming out the haze and the dust, and looking not only exhausted but just covered from head to foot with soot and other debris, and I asked, someone who was there, I said 'are they using respirators, are they getting some kind of respite from this?' And I was told oh yes fine, you know, fine, don't need to worry about it."

  Concerns about the level of toxicity in the air were quickly allayed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Forty-eight hours after the towers' collapsed EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman spoke to the press from Ground Zero. "Right now we're not getting any elevated levels that indicate concern. We have monitored in Brooklyn, we are monitoring in what within a ten block area, in ten blocks of this area and again levels are all well below any indication of a health risk," she said.
  See a graphic which shows what was in the dust
  (opens in a new window)
  Courtesy of the New York Times

  Six days after 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange reopened. Foul smelling smoke and dust still hung over the city, but America was open for business. And on September 18th, the EPA released a statement that would have far reaching consequences. It made official what Whitman had been saying for days. The air is safe to breathe.

  "We all laughed. We said this is ridiculous. I don't know what sample is she taking, but we all looked at each other in disbelief. Not that it made a difference. We weren't going home. We were going to stay for the duration. We were going to get this job done," remembers architect Ron Vega who knew his way around all kinds of building sites. But, he says, Ground Zero was another world. "Here we are, in a basically a seven-storey high toxic sandpit, where if you just kick it up you can send toxins into your body that could hurt you for life. You know, ten times the amount that one little scratch of asbestos on a pipe in a basement can do."

  The administration now acknowledges that people are getting sick and is providing some money for treatment but it will run out in 2009 and for many it is too little, too late. And more are being diagnosed with illnesses everyday. If these heroes are abandoned who will answer the call of service to their country when the next disaster strikes?
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  snowbird

  Yeah, I remember that morning well. I had just dropped my grandkids off at school. It was such a beautiful morning. When I walked into my building, one of the corporals told me the news. That was a day unlike any other I've known at work. Usually the police radio crackles all day with the officers alerting us to their locations.

  But that day there was nothing. Everybody spoke in hushed tones; some left work because the shock was too great. The phone didn't ring at all. We stayed glued to the television. It was so surreal.

  Sylvia
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  AK - Jeff

  My Mom lay in and out of a coma in the IC unit at the hospital. I was on my way to the hospital when a worker at the restaurant told me that a plane had hit the WTC. I went over to the hospital and saw that all the waiting rooms were full of people watching the fire in the tower, when suddenly the other tower was hit [at least I believe I was watching that live - it all runs together now]. A few minutes later we all saw the first tower begin to fall - we were in disbelief of what was happening. We watched the news all day that day and the next. Shock.

  I was still a jdub and was trying to put some sort of 'prophetic understanding' to it all. When I think of that morning I am still heartsick. I find it no wonder that we have engaged in other areas to try and fix this large national wound - though I doubt the effectiveness of all that now.

  Jeff [of the hoping I don't live to see such a thing again class]
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  Tatiana

  I woke up that morning, and turned on my computer. I saw the photos, and thought it was a joke. So, I turned on the news, and I just was in disbelief. I still have hours and hours of tape from that day. I ran to the school to get my boys. And I still cry when I see the photos.

  But, I am very angry right now at what is happening to the people who cleaned up the mess. Until I watched this documentary, I had no idea what was happening.

  http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/toxiclegacy/index2.html

  The men and women hailed as heroes were in trouble. Within weeks of 9/11 rescue workers started showing up at local hospitals with asthma, inflamed sinuses, and stomach problems. Doctors at Mt. Sinai's Center for Occupational Health were not surprised – just days after the towers collapse they had warned city authorities of looming health dangers, and had drawn up a special public advisory.

  
  Watch an interview clip with doctor Stephan Levin Runs 4:54

  "We tried to get the New York City Department of Health and others to take this up and issue it. Steal it freely, you know, without attribution. But we couldn't get anyone to do it and there tended to be a de-emphasis of hazard. I believe that it had more to do with political concerns than it had to do with the public health response. That first patient taught me that we were not mistaken in what we were worrying about. We had not cried wolf," says Dr. Stephen Levin.

  John Sferazo walked on the steel girders of skyscrapers for a living. Now walking up a flight of stairs to a doctor's office is an ordeal. He became sick within months of helping at Ground Zero. "I have chronic sinusitis, chronic breathing problems. I have reactive airway disease. I have constant gastritis, irritations of the stomach...I take 23 different medications. My condition doesn't get any better. It's not like pulling a vacuum cleaner bag out of a vacuum cleaner and shaking it out." He hasn't been able to work for four years.

  Detective James Zadroga was one of the first responders and worked close to five hundred hours at the site protected only by a paper mask. Although he quickly became very ill, the police department applied standard sick leave procedures to his case. His father Joe Zadroga remembers just how ill his son became. "If you'd looked at him you knew he was sick, anybody that looked at him knew he was sick but he would go report to the sick desk, they would say you're not sick go back to work tomorrow. And at first he'd go back to work. But then he got so sick he couldn't walk up the flight of stairs to get into work. He had to take the elevator up to go one flight of stairs."

  
  James Zadroga is one of few workers whose death has been linked to working on 9/11.

  James Zadroga couldn't work. He couldn't play with his baby daughter. He couldn't breathe, and it only got worse. In a letter to his father, he revealed that he knew he was dying. "The dead, their deaths were quick and painless, and mine has just begun. I can't breath, my throat is constantly sore, I'm always coughing and headaches and sleepless nights, nightmares, anxiety and visions haunt me everyday. And I'm all alone except for my dearest loved ones. No one cares on the job, they tell me I'm fine, go back to work, but truthfully I haven't felt this bad in my life." James Zadroga died on January 5, 2006, four and half years after he raced into the cloud of dust.

  Pathologist Dr. Gerard Breton did the autopsy, "I was immediately struck by the enormous size of his lungs. Zadroga's lungs were three times the normal weight." When Breton looked at the slides of the lung tissue he found out why. The lungs were full of debris. The autopsy slides revealed he had almost no functioning lung tissue. At least eight percent of his lungs were filled with granulomas – giant cells that form around foreign objects. "So that the person is actually being asphyxiated with his own lung because his lung was being replaced by these foreign body granulomas. When you tell me that the person was helping and cleaning Ground Zero he was exposed to all kind of foreign debris. And I find this in his lung, I have to put them together," says Dr. Breton.

  For the first time a death had been directly attributed to the dust at ground zero, but at New York City Hall, the major's office viewed the results as inconclusive. Even five years later, government officials are reluctant to admit the link between exposure at Ground Zero and illness. Senator Hillary Clinton, "If there were fears about getting business up and going, or if there were fears about litigation and liability that would have been very hard for local, and state and federal Government, and other entities to deal with, we could have taken care of that. To me the most important thing is number one, get to the truth, and number two, take care of people."

  Getting the truth and protecting people are part of the EPA's mandate. But if the air at Ground Zero was safe, why were so many people getting sick? Even some of EPA's own staff doubted the agency's assurances about safety. Among them was senior policy analyst Hugh Kaufman, "Mrs. Whitman went on national TV, smiled at the camera and told everybody everything is safe and it wasn't."

  
  A microsopic image of the dust from the 9/11 site.
  Photo Credit: David Scharf/Getty

  Within two weeks of 9/11 a disturbing analysis of the dust done by another agency – the U.S. Geological Survey – found it was extremely caustic, some of it as corrosive as oven or drain cleaner. When in contact with the moisture in people's eyes, nose throat or lungs it could burn tissue. The analysis of the dust was immediately given to the EPA, which did not release the data.

  Five months later, an enterprising newspaper, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, obtained and published it. Dr. Stephen Levin says, "Ignorance is bad enough. When you're informed as to what the nature of the material is, that it is highly alkaline and therefore likely to be corrosive when human beings are exposed to this, then becomes a failure of a different sort. It's a failure to inform of a hazard that you have every reason to understand and believe exists."

  Suzanne Mattei, a lawyer, has written several reports on Ground Zero pollution for the environmental organization, the Sierra Club. "We're not talking about one kind of pollutant. We're talking about a mixture of pollutants and nobody knows what they all do together. In this case we were talking not only about a mixture of pollutants but a mixture of types of irritants. The glass fibers, the caustic cement dust, those kinds of things wreak havoc with the system in ways that we don't even fully understand."

  
  9/11 workers often wore paper masks - which did not provide much protection from the toxic dust.

  Ground Zero workers were largely unprotected from the hazardous conditions, increasing the danger to their health. The 9/11 crash site at the Pentagon was far less toxic, yet the workers there were required to wear respirators. Not in New York, although Whitman did advise rescuers to wear some protection. But paper masks were inadequate against the intense pollution at Ground Zero. And according to many workers, proper respirators didn't become widely available for weeks. Architect Ron Vega says the proper masks were not used consistantly at Ground Zero, "It was almost impossible to communicate with this mask on, so constantly we were doing this…take it off to use the radio and if there was something going on, you didn't have time to put back on."

  Because of the urgency of the task, OSHA, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, did not invoke their usual enforcement procedures and left it to the contractors to ensure respirators were worn. Suzanne Mattei says, "There was this culture of casualness about the toxins at Ground Zero. And so if somebody said: golly, gee, should the workers wear protective equipment, EPA would say: of course; OSHA would say: of course. But nobody enforced it."

  Two years after 9/11 an investigation by the EPA Inspector General found agency statements had been rewritten by the White House council on Environmental Quality to “add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” At the time of the September 18th air is safe to breath announcement, the Inspector General found more than a quarter of their samples showed unsafe levels of asbestos and there were no results for PCBs or dioxins. The report concluded the announcement was made “without sufficient data to make such a blanket statement.” The Inspector General also found other considerations including the desire to reopen Wall Street had influenced the statements.

  Hugh Kaufman, a senior analyst at the EPA, says, "If there's a battle between economic interests and the health of firemen and policemen, it's a no brainer. The economic interests trump the health of firemen and policemen every time."
• 

  Guest with Questions

  I left work early because I was so upset but I hadn't seen any footage of the disaster until I came home. My daughter had left her tv on and the very moment I went passed her room I saw the plane crash into the tower. I was totally horrified. It truly was surreal.
• 

  NoLoveLost

  Not to mention, they can't even get their health care paid for... Sick 9/11 Workers Sue WTC Insurance Fund - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/17/health/main3066446.shtml