:: rawblogXport ::

:: Saturday, July 24, 2004 ::

U.S.: 9/11 Blunders Left Workers, Residents Literally in the Dust By Katherine Stapp, Inter Press Service
'Nobody knows what people were exposed to,' said Joel Shufro, the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a coalition of labour unions and workplace safety experts.

'The testing just hasn't been done. It's our assessment that the EPA and Health Department never considered dust to be a public health hazard,' he said in an interview.
'The programmes they did create to deal with it were purely for political cover. From day one, the primary concern was to reopen Wall Street.'

According to the latest figures from Mount Sinai Hospital's occupational health clinic, which has screened more than 9,000 rescue and recovery workers, about one-half still suffer from respiratory problems and other injuries. More than 40 percent have post-traumatic stress disorder.

'Those of us who responded to Ground Zero are in crisis,' Jimmy Willis, a member of the Transport Workers Union, recently testified before a congressional subcommittee on national security.

'Transit workers toiled for weeks at Ground Zero without respirators. Unfortunately, New York City Transit, the Department of Health and New York State deferred site air quality and safety to the EPA,' he said. 'Of the 4,000 transit workers who responded to Ground Zero, as many as half of us are now seriously ill.'

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