While many of our past readings have shown that government policies and regulations to combat ecological issues have been largely successful and are expected to continue, this GAO report begs to differ, explaining how the EPA has been inadequate in protecting the public from air pollutants after the September 11th attacks and questioning the effectiveness of its future programs. The psychological and physical effects of the attacks still last today, more than fourteen years after they occurred; it is simply mind-boggling how much smoke and dust entered the air and clouded New York City’s bright skyline for days on end. Being interested in weather, I looked up the weather for September 11, 2001, and noticed that it was a beautifully sunny late-summer day with a wind blowing from the north; if the wind had instead come from the south or west, the entire metropolitan area would have been covered in the debris, but this should not draw attention away from what actually happened, which was still devastating beyond compare.
The winds blew the ash down towards Brooklyn, Staten Island, and parts of New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, but it always seems that the government prefers Manhattan over the outer boroughs, as can be seen here in the cleanup efforts and even in snowstorms. Nevertheless, residents of Lower Manhattan still had to deal with the incompetence of the EPA, which “did not begin examining methods for differentiating between normal urban dust and WTC dust until May 2004 – nearly 3 years after the disaster” (5). Also, after stating that most of its samples did not exceed a high-risk level for asbestos, it was found that “this conclusion was to be expected because it took over 80% of the samples after residences were professionally cleaned” (5) and was “based on participation from only 20% of the eligible residences” (5).
By falsifying and contaminating their data, perhaps deliberately, the EPA consequently put thousands of people at risk. This may be one of the first readings where ethics and accountability play a large role. Even if they did not want to report the harsh truth that there were still harmful particulates in the air possibly to avoid causing mass hysteria, to save cleanup costs, or to garner support from the public for a “job well done”, the truth, as painful as it may have been, could have led to so much less suffering if it was told clearly and not covered up. Despite this controversy, people should remember that the government has still done a lot to mitigate pollution over the past few decades, but transparency is still important, and people always deserve to know the truth.
