![]() ![]() ![]() Zejnuni developed a violent, chronic cough and was recently found to have breast cancer. I was covered in it – I looked like a ghost.” “It was disgusting,” said Merita Zejnuni, 52, a cleaner who was working a few blocks from Ground Zero in the offices of banking giant Goldman Sachs on the morning of 9/11. The debris left by the twin towers, the main concentration of which became known as “the pile”, contained asbestos, lead, glass, heavy metals, concrete, poisonous gases, oil and other dangerous substances that mixed with exploding jet fuel, the contents of hundreds of offices and dead bodies to fill the air and cover the area around the site. Of 2,977 people killed in the attacks, 2,753 died at the World Trade Center. Clouds of fumes and debris billowed out over New York City. She apologised to those affected by the toxic debris.Īfter al-Qaida terrorists flew hijacked passenger jets into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, the towers collapsed. In an interview with the Guardian this weekend, Whitman said for the first time that in hindsight she had been mistaken. In 2001, government officials, most prominently the then head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Christine Todd Whitman, assured those in lower Manhattan in the days after the attacks that the air was safe. ![]() There is going to be a new generation of widows and widowers.” “There are a lot of people who are very, very ill with lung disease who will see at least 10 years taken from their normal life span,” he said, “and we are already seeing many more premature deaths occurring, and among younger people, from the cancers. “Within the next five years we will be at the point where more people have died from World Trade Center-related illnesses than died from the immediate impact of the attacks,” said Dr Jim Melius, a doctor at the New York State Laborers Union who also advises the White House on worker health, chairs the steering committee overseeing the government health program for 9/11 responders, and is a member of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch. More than 37,000 are officially recognised as sick.Ĭalls are growing for a new monument to be added to the World Trade Center site, to pay tribute to those who have died or become sick since 9/11 because of toxic exposure. Further development followed the 1993 bombing of the WTC garage.As those who lost loved ones at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93 gather for Sunday’s 15th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people, a post-9/11 health crisis is growing.Īt least 1,000 people – and probably many more – have died often lingering, painful deaths resulting from illnesses related to their exposure to debris that spread from the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan. Still in development were methods for analyzing asbestos in water and in settled dust. EPA, NIOSH, OSHA, and others had already proposed methods for determining asbestos in bulk building materials and had validated methods for asbestos particles in air. These methods built on work begun in the 1980s by organizations such as EPA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the American Society for Testing and Materials, now known as ASTM International. Several proprietary analytical methods were used. Thus, asbestos sample collection and analysis became a significant aspect of nearly all IEQ investigations initiated by the collapse of the WTC. A sample collected from the coating on a steel WTC beam indicated the presence of a significant amount of chrysotile asbestos-as much as 20 percent by volume. Further studies also concluded that the dust contained a large concentration of ultra-small asbestos fibers, which may be missed by standard microscopy techniques. This unusual feature would become a signature of WTC asbestos and would help investigators determine whether the asbestos found in a building might have originated from the WTC. Analysis with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed that the surface of the asbestos fibers was pitted and that atomic fragments of sulfates seemed to have chemically bonded to the fibers. Detailed investigation of the asbestos commonly found in samples indicated that the force of the explosions and collapse apparently crushed the asbestos into fibers that could potentially evade EPA’s usual testing methods. ![]()
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