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After September 11, Headlines About Air
Quality Were Everywhere
A reporter explains his misgivings about this complicated story.
Environment Reporting
By Dan Fagin
“Everything looks different from way
up close.” That’s what one of my
former editors used to tell me. I
remember thinking about that on September
11, 2001, as I watched stunned
office workers, coated in white dust
from head to shoes, trudge up West
Broadway. One by one, or sometimes
in small groups, they emerged blinking
and wide-eyed out of the fog of smoke
and ash that marked the place where,
an hour or two earlier, the towers of
the World Trade Center had stood.
From afar, through the mediating
distance of television signals and newspaper
pages, the September 11 attacks
must have looked like a horror movie.
Way up close, it felt more like a sucker
punch to the stomach: numbing, sickening
and deeply confusing.
The Environmental Fallout
I am the environmental reporter for
my newspaper, Newsday, but that day
I had rushed downtown to fulfill a less
specialized journalistic function: I was
interviewing survivors and rescuers and
was relaying their quotes to the city
desk, along with whatever hard news I
could glean. Even on that first day, it
was obvious there would be environmental
implications to the story. The
dust was everywhere—stinging our
eyes, irritating our throats, and making
us spit every minute or two. When the
wind shifted our way, it was hard to
breathe.
In the weeks to come, the number of
purely “environmental” stories about
the attacks would gradually increase
from a trickle to a steady flow. I contributed
several. One of my stories focused
on debunking early reports that
had claimed there was no asbestos in
the towers. Another confirmed that in
the days after the attack, local air quality
generally complied with federal standards
everywhere except right at
Ground Zero. Several other stories I
wrote pointed out that many rescue
and construction workers weren’t taking
even basic precautions to protect
themselves from fumes at the still-smoldering
site.
Those rescue workers were the
people who had the longest and most
intense exposures to the chemicals
emanating from the debris pile. I
thought they were the right place to
focus coverage—especially because
many of the workers, in the feverish
turmoil of those early days, were refusing
to wear protective equipment even
when it was available. I believe environmental
health coverage should revolve
around risk, and in this story
those unprotected workers were the
ones at greatest risk.
New York, however, is not the kind
of place where risk analysis drives news
coverage. Instead, the imperatives of
the news business, and the fear, frustration
and seething anger of hundreds
of thousands of city residents, quickly
began to set the coverage agenda. Community
groups began doing their own
air testing, often cherry-picking a small
number of test results to paint a dire
picture about the extent of the contamination.
Headline-hunting politicians
and longtime critics of the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
got involved, and the EPA offered itself
up as an easy target by giving slow and
sometimes inconsistent answers about
whether the air was “safe.”
Soon, in some of the city’s papers,
the “toxic air” story had become a mainstay
of local post-attack coverage. Other
aspects of the disaster—the mass
deaths, the lack of successful rescues
after the first day, and the epidemic of
depression among city firefighters, to
name just a few—were so devastatingly
sad, and so inarguably final, that they
tended not to make good stories. Neither
did the intricacies of public finance
and urban planning that were
key to the redevelopment of the site.
The environment story, on the other
hand, was nearly perfect: It was an
ongoing threat, it had a villain (those
bumblers at the EPA!), and plenty of
already-traumatized victims. Most importantly,
there was—and still is—
enough scientific uncertainty about the
health effects of many of the compounds
measured in the air of Lower
Manhattan that reporters could, and
did, say just about anything they wanted
about the gravity of the threat.
Health Risks in Context
From a distance, it looked like a good
story. Way up close, I had misgivings.
There’s always uncertainty in environmental
health stories. To me, that’s
always been one of the great pleasures
of the environment beat: There’s still
so much left to argue about. But with
the September 11 story, I found that I
didn’t have the stomach for the usual
give-and-take between environmentalist
embellishers and industry apologists
over whether the people of Lower
Manhattan faced a hypothesized added
cancer risk of one in 10,000 or one in
10 million. It all seemed like a makebelieve
game in comparison to the stark
reality of what those dust-covered
people had seen and done on September
11.
Why the misgivings? The pollution
was real, after all. The pulverization of
more than a million tons of concrete,
steel and glass—not to mention air
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 53