In the NEWSPAPER

Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2001
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Hostile Environment Near WTC

By J. Gonzalez

Darkness was descending on the crowd of 100 or so protesters gathered outside City Hall on Tuesday evening.

For more than an hour, several people in the crowd - most of them middle-class women and teenagers who looked unaccustomed to demonstrating - took turns recounting their ordeals since Sept. 11, telling stories the leaders of our city find inconvenient these days.

"It's like we're screaming in the wind and no one listens," said Diane Lapson, who has lived at Independence Plaza in Tribeca for nearly 30 years.

For the last three months, Lapson and many of her 5,000 neighbors at Independence Plaza have been unable to sleep. Across from their complex of buildings is the pier where Ground Zero workers lad debris from the World Trade Center disaster onto barges for shipment to a Staten Island landfill. "We can't stand it anymore," said Lapson, a vice president of the tenants association. "We have crashing sounds every night, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

It's so loud that the ground shakes, the glass in her 31st-floor terrace door has cracked and the cable reception on her television is constantly interrupted, she said.

But it is not just the noise that's troubling.

Even more worrisome to the thousands living in lower Manhattan are their many unanswered questions about possible health effects from toxic substances in the air.

Air Quality at Issue

Stuyvesant High School Parents Association President Malian Christodoulou spoke about the independent tests her group had done a month ago, which showed levels of particulate manner in the air often above federal safety levels. She talked about three teachers, including Mark Bodenheimer, a 30-year veteran math instructor at the school, who have left Stuyvesant since Sept. 11 because of respiratory problems they believe are related to the school's air quality.

She mentioned the numerous health complaints among the 3,000 students at the school. She and other Stuyvesant parents and students say they are frustrated because the Board of Education reopened the school Oct. 9 but has yet to upgrade the building's air filtering system to keep out possible contamination from the outside.

Only three weeks ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency's outside air monitoring station at Stuyvesant recorded an asbestos level of 124 fibers per square millimeter, far above federal safety levels.   

The EPA has repeatedly stated that exceeding those levels is dangerous only for long-term exposure, but if any of that asbestos were to penetrate Stuyvesant's air system, it could recirculate inside.

No matter how often the government tells the public that levels of toxic chemicals are below federal safety standards and pose no health threats, many remain skeptical because so many continue to feel sick from the air.

"We've knocked on more than 300 doors (*correction: 3,000 doors) and we've asked everyone how they feel," said Shirley Kwan, who works at a bank in the Financial District and lives on White St. "Many have terrible coughs, others have rashes they didn't have before." 

'A Burning Smell'

Kwan organized a group people in Chinatown and formed a network of block captains to look after the neighborhood's large immigrant and elderly population. 

"The bad air gets in our apartments especially during the evening," she said. "It's a burning smell, and it stays in your apartment."

Kwan said she has suffered two months of bronchitis with a terrible cough.

"I was coughing so badly, and all the muscles on my rib cage hurt so badly that once I even had to go to the emergency room," she said. Her doctor told her to move away for a while. She stayed with friends in Queens, and within a week, her cough subsided.

Our government keeps looking at the thousands of air quality tests and it keeps repeating: It's all right, don't worry.

Whatever discomfort people downtown may be experiencing is only temporary, they tell us. You need be concerned only if you're asthmatic or have respiratory problems, in which case you should stay out of the area.

As for the people who keep pleading to have the load of contaminated debris moved away from a high school or from a residential complex where many haven't had a good night's sleep in three months, they are either misguided or just plain troublemakers.

These people should understand we have to sacrifice to rebuild lower Manhattan as quickly as possible, say the politicians, who go home to fresh air and a peaceful night's sleep.