While reading this post I was thinking to myself, how often have I been in the contaminated area after 9/11 when the air wasn’t officially clean. Due to the failure of the first project, the air was still not clean. Speaking of the first effort to clean, it was very surprising to me that only 20% of people eligible for the service actually refused the building treatment. Other than that I think that it was very smart to test again. Although adding the other bad air tests to the program, I agree with the article in saying that it is still an issue that testing was not ordered upon north of Canal and Brooklyn.
One problem I have is the lack of social awareness that the EPA provided, not giving anyone a fully educated chance to decide if 1. They want their home cleaned and 2. if its safe to be living and breathing where there are. I think they did a really poor job doing the one job they had. One other thing they did wrong was not implementing the new program for such a long time after the collapse of the towers on 9/11. Because the quality of service done the first time was so poor people breathed in hazardous air in for about another 5 years which I definitely dont believe to be a safe amount of time to be exposed to something like asbestos.
Overall I think that if the EPA did the correct job the first time, there would be a lot smaller number of people affected by post 9/11 disease from exposure to bad air toxins. I don’t know why a government agency was allowed to do such a poor job on something like this. Maybe this could lead to a conspiracy theory…
