Don't Hold Your Breath

When I was working for the Lower Manhattan Business Improvement District (which, for some reason, wasn't even called that), one of the main questions I heard post-9/11 was "Is the air safe?" Many people wore masks in the first few weeks, because the particles in the air were actually visible to the naked eye, and, you know, duh. We had the EPA report that told us the air was reasonably safe. I don't think anyone believed it was healthy to walk around digging in the rubble at the WTC site without a respirator mask, though. This whole stink over the initial report is all about lawsuits. Debris removers are complaining of respiratory ailments, which doesn't surprise me. They want to punish the EPA for telling them the air was safe. OK, I feel for them, it sucks to be ill, but what good does it do to spend all this money and time fighting over an old report? The fact is, people would have been working down there cleaning up, rescuing, and recovering even if the EPA had said that breathing the air around "Ground Zero" would cause you to spontaneously explode. You couldn't keep them away. It's not the residents or area workers who are making mass complaints, but the people who were actually sifting through the broken remains and, sorry to say, ashes of the victims. If the EPA was too light on the hazards of the air, maybe it was because we needed to believe it was safe, that we were safe.