| 9/11 Documentary Transcript
The documentary begins with a few “teasers.” These people
are subtitled at their later appearances.
John Sferazo
And to this day, I can still hear the squealing of the iron. I can
hear the rumbling of the first tower coming down. So being an ironworker
and being a person in the construction field, where every day you face
some type of hazard, some type of danger. Well, right after we witnessed
that collapse, we knew that we wanted to go into the Trade Center site.
Meanwhile everybody else is running from it, and here you’ve
got a bunch of guys, first responders, that are looking to go in.
**********************
Suzanne Mattei
We would have been better off if EPA had said nothing at all because
if EPA had said nothing at all, people would have used their commonsense.
They would have said, “Looks bad. Smells bad. Probably shouldn’t
breathe it in.” But EPA said, “It’s fine. It’s
safe. We’ve tested it. Come back. And everybody came back, and
thousands and thousands of people were exposed.
***********************
John Sferazo
The smell of death. You know things that we remember that you really
don’t want to remember.
********************
David Worby
Here was the worst toxic waste site ever, and no one in government
did a thing to protect the hundreds of thousands of people who were
there.
***************************
Alex Sanchez
We’ve been abandoned by local, state, and federal government.
****************************
Title Page:
The Toxic Clouds of 9/11
A Looming Health Disaster
Johnson/Startzman Films
***************************
John Sferazo
Subtitle: John Sferazo, Iron Worker
President, Unsung Heroes Helping Heroes
My name is John Sferazo. I was a union structural iron worker with Local 361
and I had been a construction worker, an iron worker, for almost 25 years,
both outside local and inside locals, and I helped build a lot of New York
City’s skyline.
I was there something between 29 to 32 days. And my first four days, sometimes
we were there around the clock. We weren’t getting paid. We were there
as volunteers, utilizing our capacity as iron workers to cut up debris such
as the enormous iron beams and columns, all the massive structures that were
still there.
**************************
Congressman Nadler
Subtitle: Congressman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY
Obviously, 9/11 was a tremendous health disaster, and in my opinion the response
of government on all levels-federal, state, and local government-was
not only inadequate, it was dishonest and wrong and is largely responsible
for many, many people getting sick and many people who will get sick that we
haven’t seen yet. Within two days of the disaster, Christie Todd Whitman
started lying about the safety of the air. She said within a couple of days
that the air was safe to breathe and the water was safe to drink before we
had any adequate data to support such a statement, and she kept lying about
it after we had plenty of data that said that it wasn’t true.
*********************
Narrator: Christie Todd Whitman is no longer head of the EPA and is facing
two different lawsuits. The Department of Justice lawyer representing Whitman
declined our request for an interview, citing the pending litigation.
*********************
H.
She doesn’t want us to use her name.
On 9/11, I was working in a building next to the World Trade Center and I was
involved in the destruction of the building in the sense that I was covered
in dust when we fled the building,
like everybody in the area. And as a result when I got home I took a good shower
to get all the dust off of me, which was all over my clothes, my hair, I looked
grey like a ghost.
I was fine for about three days, and then I started spitting up a little bit
of blood, not a lot, and then symptoms began appearing such as my hands and
feet swelled up, and I continually coughed, I could hardly breathe. My hands
and feet were excruciatingly painful. We have now determined that I have asthma
and will have for the rest of my life, and at that time, it was a very extreme
case and had to be treated immediately. As for my hands and feet, which was
the worst of it, they couldn’t determine what was wrong and called it
peripheral neuropathy, that my nerves had been burned.
******************************
John Sferazo
But I knew something was drastically wrong even while at the Trade Center.
I had what most doctors call a WTC cough, and I would start coughing up, most
of the time dry, but sometimes sputum that was grey and blackish. Sometimes,
blood even being mixed in depending upon how hard you were coughing or what
you were actually exposed to.
******************************
Hugh Kaufman
Subtitle: Hugh Kaufman, Chief Investigator
Office of the EPA Ombudsman
One of the things that did concern us when we investigated the Katrina case
and the World Trade Center case is that the public health problems were being
minimized by using terms like World Trade Center cough or Katrina cough. In
the case of the World Trade Center case, people weren’t just coughing,
healthy, young strapping men can’t work any more. Many of them can’t
even climb a set of stairs.
*******************************
John Sferazo
I had no respiratory problems prior to this and all of a sudden now I’m
getting repeated lung infections, pneumonia.
*********************************
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney
Subtitle: Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY
We remember the signs all across the city “iron workers, come quickly,
come to the site. We need you.” The ironworkers rushed down to help work
the iron to find the people, and now many of them are sick and there is no
health care for them. It’s very hard to believe, but it’s been
four and a half years, and not one single federal dollar has been dedicated
for the health care of the sick workers.
**********************************
John Sferazo
I was in such good shape prior to this. I mean, I could climb columns, like
it was my job for part of my life, it was a large part of my life. You have
to be, you have to have a high upper body ratio to your mass weight to be able
to pull yourself up a column and to do that continually, repeated floors, and
I had no problem doing that whatsoever. Today I don’t even think about
going up the stairs that are set on a job site to get to these upper elevations.
**********************************
Hugh Kaufman
Subtitle: Hugh Kaufman, Chief Investigator
Office of the EPA Ombudsman
I’m Hugh B. Kaufman, and I’m an engineer with the Environmental
Protection Agency. I was one of the people who started the Agency over 35 years
ago, and I started our program for toxic waste, solid waste, and emergency
response. For the last 35 years, on and off, I’ve been the chief investigator
on hazardous sites for EPA. When I was the chief investigator for the EPA ombudsman’s
office, I investigated the environmental and public health issues related to
the World Trade Center attack. We held two public hearings that lasted almost
twelve hours each in February and then in March of 2002 as part of our investigation.
We had testimony from the public, we had testimony from leading scientists
from all over the country, and we found that the area was a public health and
environmental catastrophe.
*******************************
Bonnie Giebfried
Subtitle: Bonnie Giebfried, EMT
Board, Unsung Heroes Helping Heroes
We were one of the first units into the South Tower. We got three individuals
out of the South Tower. The last thing I remember seeing actually was a helicopter
trying to go on one of the towers to get people off the tower, and just briefly
remember hearing it, someone say it was going to blow and at that point, you
had a humongous fire ball; it looked like a meteor coming at us.
Narrator: As Bonnie and several others dashed into a nearby building, the wall
of debris sealed the entrance.
There was thirty of us were buried alive. We tried so desperately to get out
from where we came in, and it was just worse than concrete. You couldn’t
even budge it, and we basically started banging on the windows to try to break
them, but the windows are heavily reinforced in buildings down there and there’s
like four thick panes of glass. And the air was getting so thin because everything
was burning, superheated, and this was all blocking our access out. Basically,
I remember hearing my heart beat and people were stopping breathing at that
point. And, basically, I said, “God, take care of my friends and my family” and
I basically closed my eyes and expected to die at that point. And I heard pop,
pop, pop, and Lieutenant Tim McGinn, who was in the front, was the police officer
that was with us, got to his gun, and it was a miracle that the windows broke.
Narrator: Bonnie had never had asthma before 9/11, but by the time the day
was over, she had had three bad asthma attacks.
Finally got treatment because my chest was killing me; I was having a second
asthma attack. And just the feeling of, people just don’t understand
not being able to catch your breath, not
being able to fill your lungs. It’s such a horrible, horrible feeling.
It feels like someone’s crushing your chest, sucking everything out of
you.
**************************
Hugh Kaufman
Well, one of the things we were concerned about when we did the investigation
a couple of months after the World Trade Center case was that the heroes, the
ironworkers, the firefighters, the police, the responders were not being protected,
and we were concerned that they would get very sick one year, five years, ten
years down the line, and I’m sad to report that we are seeing these illnesses
now.
************************* Bonnie Giebfried
I was never sick like this before. I was playing on three soccer teams,
three softball teams, a racquet ball league, a paddle ball league.
I was fishing, I was hiking, I was climbing mountains. I can’t
even climb up stairs now. I just can’t catch my breath. My vocal
chords got burnt. My nasal passages will never be the same. I have
chronic sinusitus, bronchitis, asthma. I just got over having pneumonia
for the third time. Never had pneumonia before 9/11. And now they’re
concerned with my heart because every time you have a asthma attack
or the pneumonia your heart enlarges to pump and get oxygen to your
body.
******************************
Stephen Levin
Subtitle: Stephen Levin, M.D., Director, Mount Sinai
Occupational and Environmental Clinic
Well, we were horrified on September 18, 2001, when the head of the EPA, Christie
Todd Whitman, got on television and said she was glad to be able to reassure
people that the air quality was safe. I remember listening to that and being
aghast, just horrified that she could say such a thing. And there were a couple
of reasons why I had the reaction I did. One, I knew that she didn’t
have the data to be able to make such a statement, that at that point there
was very limited monitoring that had been done.
***************************
Joel Kupferman
Subtitle: Joel Kupferman
NY Environmental Law and Justice Center
And we ended up getting pretty close to the site, and I came back and I collected
samples from a building that borders the World Trade Center site, and those
samples turned out to be five percent asbestos and ninety percent fiberglass.
And we discovered that the National Toxicology Program considers fiberglass
to be likely to be carcinogenic. The EPA came back at one time and said, “It’s
just likely to be carcinogenic; that was their defense. And I said, “Would
you likely go down an alleyway if someone’s likely to have a knife?”
***************************
Bonnie Giebfried
Anytime that the media is around, “Well, how can you attribute this to
9/11?” Sorry, Tim Keller was less than a foot from me. Tim Keller is
dead. Felix Hernandez who was out in the field with us, he’s dead. These
are people that are not old individuals, we’re active, we were active.
They’re dead. They’re not coming back.
*************************
David Worby
Subtitle: David Worby, Attorney
9/11 Workers’ Class Action Suit
We would waste potentially thousands of innocent lives of our second class
of heroes, perhaps more heroic than the first class who were heroes by circumstance
and by victimization of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong
time. These heroes by job and by inclination put their hearts and souls on
the line to try to find a ring, to try to find DNA evidence, to sift through
garbage for months and months and months to try to identify human remains and
are now going to lose their lives because of it.
**************************
Congressman Nadler
We had data from the geological survey, from Cahill and all these others about
how the toxic stew was the worst they had ever seen. In fact, there were instruments
on the, the University of California Davis, which was under contract I think
to the United States Geological Survey, put instruments on the roof of this
building. Now this building is about a mile north of Ground Zero, and three
weeks afterwards, they were detecting all kinds of the worst stew they had
ever seen-every different contaminant you could think of-asbestos
to lead to manganese to zinc to you name it, all kinds of particulate matter.
They detected a very high Ph level, a very high alkalinity. They said it was
like breathing in Draino, you can imagine what that does to your lungs. And
yet the federal and state governments were telling people it was safe to breathe,
it was safe to come back and start working, it was safe to go to Stuyvesant
High School right there. It was safe to come back to your apartment.
*****************************
Kelly Colangelo
Subtitle: Kelly Colangelo
Lower Manhattan Resident
On September 11, I was at my office in New Jersey, and I couldn’t get
back to the city until the next day. I snuck back to my apartment and missed
all the security to find out what had happened, and when I did walk into my
apartment, it looked like it was snowing; it was just full of dust. And it
was hard to breathe in there. Just two days later, just two days after that,
I started getting terrible headaches, and I had a sore throat and a very deep
cough, a very deep, heavy cough, and after I moved back into my apartment,
the symptoms persisted, and then a rash appeared on my face and on the tops
of my hands. And the fatigue that had hit me was just so severe that I was
dreading walking up and down the subway stairs. It was terrible. After a while,
though, I started experiencing terrible gastro-intestinal problems, stomach
pains that were, just, I would just writhe in pain in bed, and I could not
get out of bed.
************************
Narrator: The collapse of the Twin Towers left a thick layer of dust over a
large area of Lower Manhattan. Contractors hastily gathered up minimum-wage
workers, in some cases illegal immigrants, to clean the interiors of the buildings
near Ground Zero. Most of these workers who cleaned apartments and offices
wore no masks as they toiled in the thick dust, and large numbers are now chronically
ill.
Alex Sanchez
Subtitle: Alex Sanchez
9/11 Cleanup Worker
My name is Alex Sanchez. I’m 39 years old. This is my son, Jack Anthony
Sanchez; he’s five years old. My mother is Iris Ramirez; she’s
fifty-six-years old. And my baby’s godfather, Manuel Checo, and he’s
fifty-five-years old. The three of us performed cleanup work in the surrounding,
buildings surrounding Ground Zero. Manuel and myself were there for six months;
my mother was there for three months. We worked seven days a week; we worked
twelve-, fourteen-hour days, nonstop.
Being so caught up with the tragedy itself, I was not thinking properly because
if it would have been today, I would never have done this job without the proper
protection. Our working conditions in Lower Manhattan was devastating. We encountered
massive of what is known today, better known as World Trade Center dust. I’m
talking about piles of dust this high, just on a table like this.
We are extremely sick. Most of our symptoms are chronic. Manuel and myself
are developing nodules in our lungs. We suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder,
gastrointestinal reflux. We get devastating pain in our stomach. I need to
take 18 medications on a daily basis. I’m suffering from joint pains.
First there was the hip pain. My physiologist gave me Canalog, steroid shots.
I cannot get any more because he’s given me so much. And as we all know,
we all know the effects, side effects of steroids. Probably you can focus on
my knees. Actually, they’re swollen right this minute, and right this
minute, I’m in extreme pain.
********************
Hugh Kaufman
One of the things that we found in our investigation of the World Trade Center
case and is also occurring in response to the Hurricane Katrina case is that
economics is trumping public health and environmental protection.
*******************
Alex Sanchez
I feel extremely, how can
I say this, scared and at times panicky. My mother’s helping me raise my son and not only because of that,
this is my mother, I’m her only child, and when I see my mother
drain blood from her nose like it’s a faucet, it’s extremely
scary, and when I see my mother that has been hospitalized three times
already and hooked up to machines. It’s not a pretty sight.
**************************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
We thought that in the light of what the World Trade Center events
indicated and the remarkable heroism that so many of these volunteers
and workers showed that the workers’ compensation insurance companies
in New York State would behave differently, that they would be more
lenient, less challenging, less willing to fight tooth and nail over
each case. But in fact that turned out not to be the situation. If
anything, the rate of contraversion, and that’s a term that means
fighting a case, denying a case, were even higher for World Trade Center
responders than they are usually for occupational disease cases, and
that’s unconscionable.
**************************
Alex Sanchez
It took me three years to get partially compensated. My mother has not
been compensated yet. Frustration sets in immediately when you are in
pain and also you’re having the bill collector at your door knocking.
It’s like adding insult to injury. Like I said, we owe this man
big time. He carried my family financially and gave us moral support.
There came times where I just wanted to end it all, and I don’t
feel ashamed of saying this because the walls were closing in on me.
But I would look at my son on a daily basis, and that has given me the
fight to continue the struggle, to continue to bring awareness, to go
to Capitol Hill, to speak to members of Congress.
Before 9/11, I was earning roughly $700 a week. Today I’ve been
partially compensated by Workers’ Comp, and the insurance is paying
me $243 a week. Manuel was earning $131 from Workers’ Compensation.
Then Manuel lived out of his car because he lost his apartment and couldn’t
pay his bills. Go figure. If you’re earning $700 a week, and now
you’re given $131 from the Workers’ Compensation board, you
can only expect havoc.
She’s going through the whole battle with Workers’ Compensation
board, and it’s frustrating when you’re sick and you have, like
I said previously, the bill collector at your door. And sometimes I come in
and see her crying in that chair there, and that breaks my heart.
I mean, it’s only been five years now, and every day goes by we feel
worse and worse, and we’re cranky and we’re anxious and we’re
mad and we cry, we’re depressed. But it’s because we see ourselves
deteriorating.
*********************************
David Worby
I spoke in Spanish, because I’m bilingual, to hundreds of the
Latino day workers who were cleaning up asbestos as instructed with
their hands, and they sat in the audience and rolled up their sleeves
for me and showed me mutations on their skin, all types of dermatological
problems. You could hear the coughing and wheezing throughout the entire
program, and most of these people don’t even have health care
coverage.
*********************
Alex Sanchez
We have trouble with our skin. Manuel, show him.
He just recently went to the dermatologist. I go with him because he’s
lost in translation, and I serve as translator. And the doctor said he was
so sure that this was caused by 9/11 pollution.
**********************
Narrator: One day in January after the World Trade Centers had at last stopped
burning, Kelly decided that she would open her windows for the first time since
9/11.
Kelly Colangelo
I opened my windows one night, one, two three, and what comes out? All the
dust out of the window, out of the window frames, blew right into my apartment.
So it was all over the floor again, all over my sofa again, and on the window
sill. So I sent it away for testing, and I got the test results, and I saw
that they detected asbestos in four of the five samples that I sent. So I still
had three months on my lease, but I said, “You know what? My life is
more important than my lease.” I moved to midtown, and I would say in
a week, and I remember calling my mother on the phone within a week, I felt
so much better. The headaches stopped, noticeably better, the cough was still
there, but the headaches had stopped, and that was such a big event for me
because it was just so difficult to go to work every day with a pounding headache.
**********************
John Sferazo
Since 9/11, the smell of gasoline and diesel fuel is such that I don’t
get out and even fuel my own vehicles. I don’t even want it on my hands
because of the odor. Being around the job sites and being around the smell
of the diesel and gasoline, I am so symptomatic to that involvement that I
was constantly getting problems with my throat, I would wind up going hoarse,
and I would lose my voice, sometimes the next thing you know from a sore throat,
I’d have a chest infection, I’d get lung infections, then I’d
get pneumonia, and this never ever happened to me before in my life. Now the
smell of smoke actually ensickens me, sometimes giving me a headache. I know
I can’t use any type of cologne or aftershave. I can’t take that
smell, it’s sort of like a burning inside my nostrils. I’m very
acute, or I have an acute response.
********************
Alison Johnson
Subtitle: Alison Johnson
Author, Producer/Director
I’m Alison Johnson, and I would like to tell you why I decided to make
this documentary about the health effects resulting from the terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center. There will be many other documentaries about 9/11,
but this one will undoubtedly be unique in its emphasis upon the development
of chemical sensitivity in large numbers of people who were exposed to the
toxic clouds of 9/11. What led me to this point? Over a decade of research
into the condition known as multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS.
Graphic appears with words:
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
MCS
In my book and video on Gulf War syndrome, I documented the existence
of chemical sensitivity in a large percentage of the 200,000 veterans
of the first Gulf War who are now chronically ill. These soldiers had
prolonged exposure not only to the oil well fires that burned for months
in Kuwait, but also to sarin and other nerve agents that our forces
blew up during the war.
**********************
Bill Meggs
Subtitle: William Meggs, M.D., Ph.D.
Brody School of Medicine, NC
Chemical sensitivities are often acquired after a high dose of devastating
exposure to chemicals. This is exactly the situation that developed after the
World Trade Center collapse.
************************
Bonnie Giebfried
I can’t be in restaurants because God forbid someone has perfume
on. I can go into a fit. I can feel nauseous and throw up. My throat
can close up. My eyes will water. My nose will start itching and I will
get a drip. People don’t realize that there’s more than just
the physical injury, the respiratory injury, the psychological. The multiple
chemical sensitivity issues that have come from 9/11 have not been addressed.
***************************
Bill Meggs
There’s a significant percentage of people in our population who
have a hyper-reactivity to common environmental chemicals, things like
cigarette smoke and paint fumes and solvents and cleaning products, ammonia,
various irritating chemicals. And the more extreme of these individuals
have what we call multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, and these are
individuals who are so sensitive to these everyday chemicals they have
problems involving multiple organ systems, and in the more extreme cases
are actually disabled by their inability to function in ordinary society
where every day of our lives we’re exposed to a host of these environmental
chemicals.
***************************
Bonnie Giebfried
I can’t do normal, everyday things. I really have to police myself
to make sure that I’m not going to be exposed to, “Oh, my
God, gas fumes.” The propane for the barbeque, household cleaners,
Oh, my God, you just might just as well pack me up at that point and
just send me to the hospital.
************************
Joel Kupferman
I’ve been tracking the firefighters post-9/11, and what many, many
have told me and that medical reports have showed that they become hypersensitive
to other chemicals that are out there. The could be fine for a while,
they have, you know, respiratory problems. They’re on 3/4 time,
meaning that they’re not on active duty, and boom, they’ll
come across perfume or other chemicals out there, even household cleaning
chemicals, and they’ll just become immobilized, and some of them
just become so sick that they can’t, they basically can’t
function on a daily level.
*************************
Narrator: Christine Oliver, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard
Medical School, is the former director of Occupational and Environmental
Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Christine Oliver
Subtitle: Christine Oliver, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
So it’s very important if you’ve experienced something like the
September 11th attacks, very important for New Yorkers to understand, that
in order to prevent development of chemical sensitivity, development of multiple
chemical sensitivity, worsening of multiple chemical sensitivity, it’s
very important that they avoid to the extent possible further exposure to irritant
chemicals. So they need to be very careful about how they clean their apartments,
what apartment they choose to live in, what kind of renovation work they choose
to do on their apartment. All of these things are extremely important.
*************************
Rachel Hughes
Subtitle: Rachel Hughes
Lower Manhattan Office Employee
After the 9/11 attacks, I wanted to help, I needed to do something before I
could return to work. I needed to be involved helping in some way, and I went
to the city and volunteered and went down a few blocks from the Trade Towers,
and I volunteered handing out sandwiches to rescue workers who were coming
out from the pile.
I returned to work within a couple of weeks after the attacks happened. My
office was located about eight blocks north of the Trade Towers, and even at
that time the dust was so heavy, there was dust all over our office. We were
having to clean it, and I wore a mask to work. I only had surgical masks and
what I found at the hardware store, but I wore a mask to work at that time
because the air was just, it smelled horrible, it was thick, and it was just,
the dust was making it hard to breathe then.
********************
Hugh Kaufman
Well, the public was told after the 9/11 catastrophe to just mop up and clean
up with a wet, damp rag their own spaces from all these toxics, which of course
is a violation of the rules. The public, after a terrorist attack, where they’re
exposed to hazardous materials that can harm them and in some cases be life
threatening is not required to clean up their own space with a wet mop and
broom, but in fact the government is required to clean it up to protect them.
*********************
Rachel Hughes
Within the day after 9/11, I started having flu symptoms, and I had a fever
and cough, dry eyes, burning eyes, itching skin, dry skin, the sores. I also
just had trouble breathing and sleeping. And after 9/11, after September, October,
I continued to work full-time and just had chronic flu-like symptoms, which
would let up for a week or two at a time and then return, and I just started
going to see doctors, and I had pneumonia and bronchitis and just upper respiratory
problems with my throat, sore throat, problems with my voice, and that over
the last four years has just continued to reoccur. I also have joint and muscle
pain that’s chronic. Since 9/11, I’ve had fatigue that actually
prevented me from being able to go to the gym, do yoga, do the normal things
that I once did and just walking up a flight of stairs or walking a few blocks-two
to four blocks-will exhaust me to the point of needing to rest. I’ve
been seeing doctors for my lungs and sinuses at Mount Sinai Hospital, and they’ve
done pulmonary tests. I’ve had second and third opinions with pulmonary
tests as well that show that my lungs are only functioning at 30 percent capacity.
************************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
What came as something of a surprise to us was the high rates of both upper
respiratory and lower respiratory problems that were so persistent among people
that we saw in our screening program. We did an analysis of about a ten percent
sample of our 12,000 examinees, and among them just about half had symptoms
involving their lower respiratory system, their chest-shortness of breath,
chest tightness, cough, wheezing-and about another half had upper respiratory
symptoms-sinusitis, facial pressure, headaches, stuffy nose, post-nasal
drip, the kind of classic symptoms of sinusitis.
***************************
Rachel Hughes
I’m very sensitive to chemical smells, even to the point of having to
change perfume, not wear perfume or change body lotions or shampoo.
These are some of my paintings that I was working on in 2000 or 2001 before
9/11 and since then I, even though I’ve been home and I’ve been
resting, and I’ve only been able to work part-time, I can’t paint
right now because I’m too sensitive to the, even the acrylic paint, even
water-based paint, I’m too sensitive to it. I’m too sensitive to
my markers to use markers for illustration, and drawing. So my painting studio
are has turned into a medical billing station.
The apartment building that I live in they keep it very clean, which is wonderful,
except for me, when I go into the elevator or the halls, which don’t
have a lot of ventilation, the chemicals that they use to clean-ammonia
or solvents, whatever it is-I can barely breathe. I actually try to hold
my breath going down in the elevator because it affects me so strongly. Gives
me a headache and upsets my sinuses.
*************************
Alex Sanchez
We have problems with getting into places where there’s lots of chemicals
or heavy perfume. Our lungs is not there no more.
************************
Hugh Kaufman
One of the things that we uncovered at EPA doing investigations of releases
of hazardous material is large numbers of people where there are releases start
to develop what we call chemical sensitivity so we’re seeing health effects
to the public around hazardous sites like the World Trade Center a year, two
years, three years down the line, where people are now sensitive to chemicals.
A little bit of perfume, for example, which would not affect anybody, can make
people deathly ill.
*************************
Kelly Colangelo
And then about a year ago I noticed that I was becoming very sensitive to certain
smells like perfumes, colognes, and cigarette smoke, even outside as well as
diesel fuel. I have noticed in the past few months my sensitivity to cigarette
smoke, and actually it’s been more than the past few months, it’s
probably been over a year now. When I walk down the sidewalk and somebody is
smoking it-I could just scream. I just can’t stand the smell anymore.
Someone who is wearing too much cologne, I have to get away from them. I hold
my breath now when I walk by buses because the diesel smell is too much for
me to handle. That’s when I started getting hay fever symptoms again-the
runny nose, the headaches.
**************************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
Another striking thing is that many of our patients are much more reactive
to strong odors than they were before, not always with exactly the same reaction
that they’ll experience when they are exposed to cigarette smoke or bus
exhaust, but they notice these odors more and find themselves reacting physically
unpleasantly to these odors in ways they never did before. I have patients
who cannot walk into a department store cosmetic area without experiencing
shortness of breath and chest tightness in ways they never did before. I have
patients who cannot get on an elevator where someone is wearing strong perfume
or cologne without experiencing fairly intense respiratory reactions. We don’t
always understand why this is so, but it is extremely commonly reported among
our World Trade Center responders and many of our patients say that they are
simply unable to wear fragrances themselves or be around other family members,
friends, who wear such fragrances because they simply can’t tolerate
them.
**************************
Suzanne Mattei
Subtitle: Suzanne Mattei
NYC Sierra Club Director
I’m Suzanne Mattei. I’m the New York City executive for the Sierra
Club. I work out of the field office of the Sierra Club in New York City, and
I’ve had about 20-25 years of experience in environmental law and policy.
I did a lot of investigation of Ground Zero pollution issues, how the federal
government responded, produced a report that was about 200 pages long, depending
on how it’s printed. And I have some experience in analyzing things like
incineration and demolition. I’m just one person. The Environmental Protection
Agency is an entire body of people that have been studying the products of
incineration and controlled incineration and demolition for decades. I had
a pretty good idea of what was in that cloud of smoke coming out of those towers,
and I think that the EPA did, and in fact I know that the EPA did too. I think
they had a very, very good idea of what was in that cloud. They should have
known, and I believe did know, that there would be asbestos, lead, cadmium,
chromium, a whole range of chemicals that cause cancer and also affect the
human immune system and of course the respiratory system.
**********************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
Physicians in our country are not trained in occupational medicine. I think
there are all of two or three classroom hours devoted in four years of medical
school to occupational and environmental illness, so one can hardly blame well-intentioned
doctors who are seeing patients who are complaining of respiratory problems
from the World Trade Center exposures if the doctors didn’t know how
to understand this and evaluate it, and many of our patients told us that they
went to doctor after doctor, received course of antibiotics after course of
antibiotics, for what was not an infection; it was in fact a chemical burn.
*********************** Thomas Michaels
Subtitle: Thomas Michaels
NYPD Detective
And we helped for eight, nine, ten days to try to recover what we thought might
be people that were alive.
Well, when I was at the Police Academy in 1988, we had a Hazmat procedure then,
you know. They’ve always had Hazmat procedures. Well, how come the procedure
was, “Here’s a paper mask and a shovel. Have a good day.” And
then they say, well, they gave us the good masks. No, they didn’t give
us the good masks. The people that wore the good masks were on the perimeter,
all those self-important people, running around nine blocks away with all this
stuff on their faces. They look like the super. You know, they had belts for
belts, you know, and clipboards for clipboards. I mean, like all this really
cool stuff, and I’m sitting up there with my boots, my jacket, my pants,
and I’ve got a burn with a paper mask.
I played in a Bronx football league at the age of 41, all right, my fifteen
interceptions might have led the league, I think it did, and a year and a half
later I can’t walk up a flight of stairs. That’s sad. So I must
have just gotten old all of a sudden. I played twenty years of football, and
all of a sudden I can’t do anything, I can’t walk down a hill without
like stopping and having to breathe.
*************************************
Narrator: The EPA contains hundreds of dedicated
scientists who are career employees, but the head of the EPA is appointed
by the White
House. The EPA’s own Inspector General issued a report in 2003
that was critical of Christie Todd Whitman’s actions after 9/11,
as was Hugh Kaufman, the chief investigator for the EPA’s Ombudsman.
Hugh Kaufman
Within a couple of days after the World Trade Center Towers came down,
EPA and particularly the Administrator of EPA, Christie Todd Whitman,
went on national television and told the public that the air was safe
to breathe and everything was fine, and people were rushed back to
lower Manhattan, asked to clean their own spaces, and there was a public
health and environmental threat that occurred for many, many months
subsequent to the collapse of the World Trade Towers, but as far as
EPA was telling the public, everything was safe. So Christie Todd Whitman
lied to the public about the safety and that saved among other groups
the insurance companies that insured people who live work, go to school
down there. It saved those insurance companies billions and billions
of dollars.
****************************
Narrator: By contrast, the financial position of those whose health
was ruined by the toxic clouds is indeed grim.
Rachel Hughes
At this point I’m about $80,000 in debt after selling my home,
my car, moving into a smaller apartment, getting rid of my painting
studio that I had in Long Island City.
*******************
John Sferazo
What I used to make in a day, I have to live on for a week now.
*********************
Bonnie Giebfried
I was making sixty grand or better. Now I’m sixty grand in the
hole.
*********************
Narrator: Professor Marjorie Clark is a national expert in the field
of the incineration of potentially hazardous materials.
Marjorie Clarke
Subtitle: Marjorie Clarke, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor, Hunter College
By the time 9/11 happened,
well, I certainly knew that there was something horrendous going on
downtown in terms of incineration, obviously, and
I knew what was being incinerated because it was household garbage, I
mean it was chairs and desks and paper and plastic and metal and glass
and everything that you would find in an incinerator was being incinerated
there. It wasn’t really being incinerated properly as in a state
of the art facility. It was being incinerated, well, it was smoldering
at a very low temperature as compared to the state of the art 1800 degrees,
which is what you like to have, with proper mixing of the air and so
forth. In this case, the air was not getting into the little pockets,
and so you were having a really awful conditions, pyrolysis conditions,
not true combustion conditions, so as a result, I was thinking, my God,
this is a dioxin factory. Everything that was being incinerated there
was not being completely combusted, so you were probably getting all
kinds of nasty substances coming out.
*************************
Jenna Orkin
Subtitle: Jenna Orkin
WTC Environmental Organization
This is Stuyvesant High School. It reopened four weeks after the collapse of
the towers, and not only did we have the World Trade Center site four blocks
to the south, but we also had right here the barge operation where all the
toxic debris was brought before going off to its final resting place on Staten
Island.
**************************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
And one of the government agencies, NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational
Safety and Health, did a respiratory symptom questionnaire among those high
school kids at Stuyvesant and did something comparable with high school kids
far removed from Lower Manhattan, and it came as no great surprise that the
rate of respiratory symptoms was much higher among the children who came back
to school in that high school down in Lower Manhattan.
************************
Jenna Orkin
The Stuyvesant auditorium had been used as a triage center, so the dogs would
retreat there, covered in toxic dust, as would the workers, and sit in the
soft auditorium seats, which absorbed the toxics. So the summer of ‘02,
a group of parents of which I was a member had the carpet tested for asbestos,
and we found 2.5 million structures per square centimeter, which experts said
was very worrisome and required an abatement. We also had high lead in the
ventilation system, and the response of authorities to these events was, “The
asbestos will stay in the carpet, the lead will stay in the walls.” End
of story, no problem.
************************
Stephen Levin, M.D.
Initially, there’s a strong suspicion that many of us had that this was
a decision, this pronouncement about the safety of air quality down there,
that was based less on public health and less on monitoring data than on a
desire to get Lower Manhattan running economically, get Wall Street going,
get the Stock Exchange going. It wasn’t until later that we had confirmation
that, lo and behold, this really was a strong influence on the EPA’s
announcements because it turned out that the Council on Environmental Quality,
the president’s own sub-cabinet-level group in the White House, had influenced
what the EPA was going to say. In fact, the EPA had been preparing to issue
a cautionary message saying, “We’re not sure what’s going
on down there but you ought to be careful because this in fact may be a toxic
environment. What the Council on Environmental Quality said to the EPA was “Emphasize
reassurance, de-emphasize hazard,” and so the EPA reversed itself.
****************************
Suzanne Mattei
Now I don’t care how important the economy is, I don’t
sacrifice my one-year-old child’s brain to it. There was lead
in that dust. It can cause permanent brain damage, so can mercury.
What on earth were they thinking in telling all of these families that
they could come back.
**************************
Jenna Orkin
In 2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation offered grants
to people to lure them back in like the Pied Piper. These grants were
especially large if you brought in children and signed a lease for
two years.
****************************
Robert Gulack
Subtitle: Robert Gulack
SEC Attorney
I’m an attorney with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission
and a union steward. On September 11, 2001, the United States Securities and
Exchange Commission offices were located at 7 World Trade, and they were destroyed
by fire that afternoon. The Securities and Exchange Commission then leased
new space here on Broadway. And our people who had not been exposed, most of
them, to World Trade Center contamination on the day of the attacks, they had
been evacuated safely without exposure because we were evacuated to the north
and the wind was blowing south, came to work at this building. Most of us immediately
fell ill. I myself am a particularly dramatic example. Two days after I came
to work at this building in fine health, I woke up at night choking with asthma,
and ever since then I’ve been sick. Ever since then I’ve suffered
from continuous reactive airway disorder, diagnosed by the experts at Mount
Sinai, the doctors who have seen 10,000 victims of these attacks. Ever since
then I suffer from recurrent attacks of bronchitis. And in the worst situation
the bronchitis exacerbated into pneumonia, and I had to be rushed to the hospital
with a fever of over 104. This is just an example of what life in southern
Manhattan is like because of the total failure of the American government to
clean up the contamination left behind when the World Trade Center was destroyed.
************************
Narrator: Large numbers of residences and office buildings in Lower Manhattan
remain contam-inated by World Trade Center dust. Toxic dust remains in many
heating and air conditioning ducts, recontaminating those units that have been
cleaned. In 2003, the EPA appointed a panel of experts to advise it on a plan
to clean up buildings in Lower Manhattan. In the fall of 2005, after over a
year of wrangling, the EPA dismissed the panel.
****************************
Robert Gulack
We’re looking forward not only to the suffering of the 10,000 people
who have already been harmed by this, who already have respiratory symptoms
and other symptoms but eventually in fifteen years, to a new tidal wave of
untreatable, fatal lung cancer, mesothelioma, because that is what this asbestos
causes, and we are going to have this epidemic, and the only question is, “How
bad is it going to be?” Every year that we delay cleaning up the asbestos
means the forthcoming epidemic is that much worse.
******************************
Congressman Nadler
So it’s too late to do, any number of people now, how many God knows,
are doomed to come down with these terrible diseases because of our negligence
up until this point. And you know other people will come down with these terrible
diseases because we don’t clean it up now, so we must continue to fight
to clean this up in order to save lives. This could go on for thirty, forty,
fifty, a hundred years; people can be continuing to breathe this in if we don’t
clean it up. And it’s nothing short of criminal negligence, criminal
negligence, that we are condemning people to early deaths by not cleaning it
up properly.
*************************
Marvin Bethea
Subtitle: Marvin Bethea, Paramedic
Cofounder, Unsung Heroes Helping Heroes
Somebody yelled, “The tower, the tower, and I looked up, and that’s
when the first tower, you could hear the rumbling, started to fall. I told
everyone to take cover in the bank. We’re in the bank, and the next thing
you know, the bank went from day to night, and the next thing you knew, it
was like being hit with debris and on top of that, think of someone taking
a big bucket of toxic dirt and dumping it down your throat at the same time.
So not only could you not see, you could not breathe at all. People were screaming.
I remember one lady in the bank was holding me so tight I thought she was going
to choke me to death just out of fear. We thought we were going to be dead.
Narrator: Marvin suffered a stroke only five months after 9/11 but recovered
sufficiently to return to work. Unfortunately, the bad asthma and other health
problems that he developed post-9/11 have forced him to take early retirement,
at a great financial loss. Like so many other responders who worked in the
horrific Ground Zero landscape strewn with blood and body parts, he also suffers
from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He recently testified to a congressional
committee investigating 9/11 health problems.
********************
Suzanne Mattei
No proper warnings, didn’t have proper safety equipment for the rescue
and recovery workers, you know, we sacrificed a generation of rescue and recovery
workers at Ground Zero. And I really believe there was a political reason for
that I don’t think that the government wanted people to be decked out
in space suits on Ground Zero while stockbrokers and parents with kids in strollers
were walking just a block away. They really created a culture of casualness,
and I feel it was so consistent with the overall message they were putting
out that I really cannot exonerate them for it. I don’t think that it
was an accident.
***************************
David Worby
Now this was an ice hockey coach of my local high school team where all three
of my children were going to high school, and I didn’t know that his
day job was being a detective in the New York City Police Department, and because
the hockey team was having such a great year people were tragedized that he
couldn’t make it to the finals because he had leukemia. And they and
he thought that the leukemia had something to do with the fact that he spent
five months, 24/7 at the World Trade Center and at Fresh Kills, and his doctor
said quite often people get leukemia from benzene poisoning. Did he have an
exposure to benzene? And that’s when I met him.
It started with Detective John Walcott. When the hockey coach came to me and
we looked into the 91,000 liters of jet fuel that were lying burning on the
ground, realizing that it might have been one of the largest benzene spills
in history, and seeing the relationship causally between that and leukemia,
we started getting concerned that although the latency periods were slightly
quicker than would have been normal under prior studies, maybe with some of
the other toxins more could have been involved. Then John had a good friend
who also lived near me who was a detective by the name of Richard Volpe, whose
kidneys were collapsing, also a young man in his thirties, and his doctors
were saying that it was from a toxic exposure, and they weren’t sure
what to do for him. Then he had a friend, and then there were some newspaper
articles and some radio. Next thing I knew I had 25 or 30 or 40 people, the
next thing I knew my phone didn’t stop ringing. Then I had 200, then
400, now it’s over 6,000. And the phone rings, and the e-mails come in
by the dozens of more people who are getting sick and need help.
The Fresh Kills site contained tons and tons of garbage of toxic waste where
everyone again was working without protection. People like Detective Wolcott
and Detective Volpe were there for months unprotected. They said that when
snow came down in the freezing weather nothing would stick to the ground. It
would just sparkle in mercury and all the other toxins that they were breathing,
and now Detective Wolcott has leukemia and Detective Volpe has collapsed kidneys.
In the same unit working together in the same place, both previously tremendously
healthy men in their thirties.
******************************
Suzanne Mattei
When you have a very hot fire, you get very, very tiny particles that
can get down deep into the lungs and lodge there and stay there and
wreak havoc with your system. Those tiny particles will contain a lot
of toxic chemicals because a lot of toxic fumes will attach to those
particles, so things like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which
is what you get when you burn anything. It’s one of the more
toxic components of cigarette smoke. That will attach to the particles.
PCBs and dioxin will attach to the particles.
*******************
Christine Oliver
Studies have shown that following the September eleventh attack a significant
amount of fine particulate matter, particles less than 2.5 micra in
diameter, which are respirable, were released into the air. Now what
it means when you say particles are respirable is that they make their
way down into the lungs. Once these fine particulates reach the lungs
they can be absorbed into the bloodstream and distributed to the rest
of the body.
******************
Alison Johnson
For some people who already had multiple chemical sensitivity before
9/11, this huge new exposure was particularly devastating. Before she
developed multiple chemical sensitivity or MCS at age 32, Jenn had a
lot going for her in life. She had degrees from MIT and NYU, she had
excellent and creative jobs, and she enjoyed activities like dance, yoga,
and African drumming. In my work as chair of the Chemical Sensitivity
Foundation, I have spoken with many chemically sensitive people, but
Jenn is definitely the worst case of MCS with which I have had direct
contact. She stands as an extreme example of the neurological effects
that chemical exposure can induce in certain individuals.
***********************************
Jenn Duncan
Subtitle: Jenn Duncan
Brooklyn resident
I had developed chemical sensitivity prior to 9/11. The office building where
I worked was doing renovations and after a prolonged exposure over several
weeks in a poorly ventilated area to a number of those chemicals I had a number
of strange symptoms and unusual things that were going on that then later on
I realized developed into multiple chemical sensitivity and other chemical
injury symptoms. After 9/11, with all the exposure of the smoke and the fumes
blowing over from Manhattan into Brooklyn, I definitely experienced exacerbations
and got even more debilitated.
And, you know, being exposed just to cologne, or if I was out around traffic,
or somebody smoking a cigarette, then it would make me disintegrate and have
the disorientation, and the trouble breathing and the great pain, joint pain.
Well, you can just imagine after 9/11, it definitely exacerbated all of that
and was a real struggle and a challenge. And like I said, it was after that
point when I became completely housebound.
It was like that for long blocks of time, and particularly it would be really
bad after they would spray for the West Nile virus.
*************************
Jay Feldman
Subtitle: Jay Feldman
Beyond Pesticides Director
It’s inevitable that a percentage of the population will develop chemical
sensitivity in a situation where there’s widespread exposure to toxic
chemicals like the World Trade Center disaster. Given that sensitivity that
inevitably develops, we really need to think twice about the use, the broadcasting
of chemicals like pesticides in the environment. Even in the case with say
West Nile Virus, because of the sensitivity, which must be factored in, the
cure may be worse than the disease.
***************************
Jenn Duncan
Spelling is hard; numbers are hard. I have dyslexia sometimes now. I always
check and double check. I would write an envelope, and it would be returned
because I mixed up my numbers. I never had a problem with numbers before. I
did calculus and differential equations. If somebody asks me numbers or to
spell something, it’s really hard. Sometimes it helps me, I used a little
sign language before, so I usually spell out just to help me get something
physical to help me get the numbers or letters out. Sorry, I’m getting
fatigued, so I’m trying to just ride the waves and hold my energy together.
*****************************
Alison Johnson
Believe it or not, that was
Jenn on one of her good days. We had also filmed her the day after
a doctor’s appointment. Jenn told us that
exposure to several air fresheners and diesel fumes in the private ambulance
that transported her had caused this temporary but sharp decline in her
condition.
While I’m saying the above, we show footage of her that day when
she could hardly talk and is seizuring badly.
***********************
Bill Meggs, M.D.
Funding for research in chemical sensitivity in this country does not
measure up to the size of the health problem, the public health problem
that it is. Japan does a much better job than we do in studying this
problem and making funds available for serious researchers. I believe
that the reason we haven’t seen more research funding is political
rather than scientific. There are commercial interests, the manufacturers
of consumer products that pollute the air we breathe and the Worker’s
Comp insurance companies and others that perceive that if we knew more
about this problem they would be liable for people’s suffering,
and frankly, they don’t want it studied.
**************************
Alison Johnson
Newspaper reporters often refer to MCS, multiple chemical sensitivity,
as a rare condition, but this is hardly the case. In 2004, the Archives
of Environmental Health published a national prevalence study by Stan
Caress and Anne Steinemann. These researchers reported that in their
national random phone survey 2.5 percent of the respondents said that
they had been diagnosed with MCS. This result suggests that over seven
million Americans may be suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity.
***********************
Bonnie Giebfried
It’s torture. You know, some days you wish you’d died that
day because living-I don’t call this living. Part of me
died 9/11. I will never get that back, and I’ve been existing
day in, day out.
*********************************
Congressman Christopher Shays
My God, we failed to protect these workers to start with, but having
failed to protect them, spending money to monitor them, to spend no
money to heal them, to make them better, to extend their life. Have
them treated as if it’s their fault. So nothing very good that
I can say about how we’ve handled this issue.
**************************************
John Sferazo
We become different people. A lot of us, we explain it sometimes as
if you were dead it would have been a final saving grace in some respect
but being left alive and symptomatic from what you experienced leaves
you a hollow shell of an individual and you feel that way because it’s
not the same you.
************************************
Credits
A Johnson/Startzman Film
Produced & Directed
by
Alison Johnson
Artistic Director &
Cinematography
Richard Startzman
Narrator
Brien White
Post-Production
CineVision Productions
Special 9/11 Photo Collection
© Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris Images
Other photos courtesy of
US EPA
US OSHA
Andrea Booher
Michael Reger
Shawn Moore
9/11 Environmental Action
Flags on Cars
Healthy Schools Network
Michael Capobianco
Betsey Grobe
Rita Ferraro
Ed Hardesty
William Hirzy
Don Shapiro
Partial funding for travel expenses came from a
Provost's Research Grant
State University of New York at New Paltz
through Donna Flayhan, Ph.D., Coordinator of
The Lower Manhattan Public Health Project
Copyright 2006-2013.
All Rights Reserved
To order this documentary
or Alison Johnson’s other documentaries
and books on Gulf War Syndrome and
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity go to the homepage
207-725-8570
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