[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 138 (Tuesday, September 18, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H10505-H10508]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         LIVING VICTIMS OF 9/11

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Klein of Florida). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Nadler) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, 1 week ago today, we marked the sixth anniversary of the 
tragic events of September 11, 2001. I appreciate the opportunity to 
speak today about an issue that faces not just my district, where the 
attack on the United States occurred, where the World Trade Center once 
stood, but our entire Nation.
  I am honored to be here today to support legislation sponsored by 
Carolyn Maloney and myself and others. Carolyn has been such a strong 
advocate for the living victims of 9/11.
  I also want to thank Chairmen George Miller and Frank Pallone for the 
recent hearings they have held on this issue, one last week and one 
earlier today.
  I am pleased to announce that yesterday, along with Congresswoman 
Maloney and others, I introduced essential new legislation that would 
ensure that everyone exposed to World Trade Center toxins, no matter 
where they live now or in the future, would have a right to high-
quality medical monitoring and treatment and access to a reopened 
victim compensation fund for their losses.
  Whether you are a first responder who toiled without proper 
protection, who came to help in the rescue and recovery from New York, 
from elsewhere in New York or from elsewhere in the country, or whether 
you're an area resident worker or student who was caught in the plume, 
or subject to ongoing indoor contamination, if you were harmed by the 
environmental effects of 9/11, you would be eligible.
  This bill builds on the best ideas brought to Congress thus far, and 
on the infrastructure already in place providing critical treatment and 
monitoring.
  Mr. Speaker, when the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 
2001, the towers sent up a plume of poisonous dust that blanketed Lower 
Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey. A toxic cloud 
of lead, dioxin, asbestos, mercury, Benzene, PCBs, PAHs and other 
hazardous contaminants swirled around the site and around Lower 
Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jersey City as rescue workers labored 
furiously in the wreckage, many without adequate protective gear. 
Thousands of first responders inhaled this poisonous dust before it 
settled onto and into countless homes, shops and office buildings where 
it remains to this day.
  Mr. Speaker, I've always said that there were two coverups conducted 
here, two coverups conducted by the administration. The first coverup 
was that the air was okay, that no one would get sick from the exposure 
to World Trade Center dust at or near Ground Zero. The administration 
denied the air was toxic and insisted that no one would get sick. They 
lied. They lied deliberately to the American people, to the people of 
New York, to the first responders. They said the air was safe, when 
they had test results saying it was toxic. As a result, tests at Mt. 
Sinai Hospital published in a peer reviewed medical study just about a 
year ago revealed that of the 10,000 first responders tested, over 70 
percent suffer

[[Page H10506]]

from lung disease at this point, or at least as of last year. We have 
seen this in test after test and study after study. All the literature 
goes in the same direction. Thousands of people are sick who need not 
have been sick. Thousands of people are sick because the administration 
lied, and because OSHA failed to do its job.
  Mr. Speaker, there was air pollution at the site of the Pentagon 
attack on this country also. But OSHA, the Occupational Safety and 
Health Administration, enforced the law. Nobody was permitted to work 
on the site without wearing proper respiratory protective gear, as the 
law demands.
  Mr. Speaker, nobody is suffering lung damage or respiratory disease 
today as a result of participating in the rescue and recovery efforts 
at the Pentagon. But in Lower Manhattan, somebody made a deliberate 
decision not to enforce the occupational safety and health laws. OSHA 
did not enforce the laws. People were permitted on the site without 
respirators. Indeed, public officials went to the site and wore only 
masks, paper masks, which were worse than useless, we are told by the 
scientists. Many workers worked without respirators. Many workers had 
no access to respirators. Police officers have testified they had no 
access to respirators.
  Many workers who did have access to respirators believed the 
assurances they got that the air was safe and didn't use the 
respirators because they got in the way of the work. The result is, 
thousands of people are sick and some are dead, unnecessarily, as a 
result of the malfeasance, the deliberate malfeasance of the Federal 
Government.
  Mr. Speaker, two things establish a moral obligation on the Federal 
Government. One, the people who were hurt, the people who are sick as a 
result of participating in the clean up, the people who are sick as a 
result of living in Lower Manhattan or working in Lower Manhattan, the 
government workers who returned to government offices in the Securities 
and Exchange Commission or other government agencies and worked there 
before the buildings had been cleaned and are now sick as a result, are 
sick for two reasons. They are sick because of the terrorist attack on 
this country, and they are sick because their government lied to them 
and urged people to go back into unsafe environments and told people 
things were safe when they weren't.

  We owe, the Federal Government owes a moral debt to all these 
victims. Because they are victims of a terrorist attack on this 
country, the words of Abraham Lincoln apply. Abraham Lincoln said that 
it is the duty of all of us to care for him who shall have borne the 
battle. The people who are sick today with deadly illnesses, with long-
term illnesses, are just as much victims of the terrorists as those 
3,000 people who were killed on 9/11, and the United States Government 
owes them long-term health care, monitoring and treatment because they 
are victims of the attack on the United States. Al Qaeda didn't attack 
them individually. They attacked United States. They happen to be the 
individual victims.
  Secondly, they are victimized because, many of them, perhaps most of 
them would not have gotten sick if the Federal Government had not lied 
to them and if the Federal Government had not decided not to enforce 
the occupational safety and health laws. That too establishes a moral 
obligation to care for the victims of the Federal malfeasance.
  Now, that is all the first coverup. But as a result of the Mt. Sinai 
study, as a result of other studies that have come out all within the 
last year as a result of some newspaper reports, that coverup has 
unraveled. Almost nobody today still maintains that these people aren't 
sick as a result of 9/11. The only question is how best to deal with 
that sickness.
  And the answer, we believe, is that the Federal Government should 
adopt the bill, Congress should adopt the bill that Congresswoman 
Maloney and I and others introduced that provides two things: one, 
reopen the victims compensation fund for people whose health was 
damaged, who weren't immediately killed, but whose lives were perhaps 
shortened, whose health was damaged as a result of 9/11 of the attack 
on our country.
  And, secondly, provide for long-term medical monitoring and treatment 
through the centers of excellence, through the institutions that have 
treated people and through a network of institutions that would be, not 
formed, but would be brought into a network around the country that 
would be fed the latest data on diagnosis and treatment. So this 
legislation ought to be adopted.
  Secondly, Senator Clinton and I have introduced legislation of a more 
immediate nature to appropriate $1.9 billion for the next 5 years to 
provide for this medical monitoring and treatment in case we cannot 
immediately adopt the long-term legislation that Congresswoman Maloney 
and I have introduced. The mayor of New York estimates that the annual 
cost of treatment for the first responders is now about $198 million 
and will increase to $413 million in the next few years as more and 
more people need more and more treatment.
  But I said there were two coverups. The second coverup is the failure 
of EPA to clean up indoor contamination. When the World Trade Center 
collapsed, it released, as I said, thousands of tons of toxic dust and 
debris. Much of it settled on the ground and in the air outdoors; much 
of it blew in through windows and into heating vents and air 
conditioning vents, into buildings, all throughout Manhattan and Queens 
and Brooklyn and perhaps New Jersey.
  Now, nature cleans up the outdoor air. The rain washes the toxins 
away. The wind blows them away.

                              {time}  1830

  Nature does not clean up the indoor air. Only people can clean up the 
indoor air. Only people can clean up the residue of those toxins that 
are still there. And if they are not properly cleaned up, they will 
stay there, and they will stay there forever, poisoning people on a 
daily basis. And that is exactly what we have reason to believe is 
going on.
  Now, the EPA said people should clean up on their own. Under the 
Giuliani administration, the City of New York said landlords should 
clean up the exterior surfaces of buildings and the public spaces in 
the buildings but let the tenants, individual tenants, individual 
residents, individual small business owners and large business owners, 
to clean up their space, without providing any help or expertise to do 
so. And, of course, most of these spaces were not properly cleaned.
  The EPA and New York City Department of Health put on its Web site 
very early on that if you came home and you saw World Trade Center dust 
in your apartment, clean it up with a wet mop and a wet rag. And if 
there is a lot of dust, if it's really thick, consider using a HEPA 
filter.
  Now, this advice is illegal because the law says you may not remove 
or move asbestos-containing material unless you are trained and 
certified and licensed to do so and unless you are wearing a moon suit, 
proper protective equipment. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health 
Administration, ruled that all World Trade Center dust had to be 
presumed to be asbestos-containing material because there were 
thousands of tons of asbestos in the World Trade Center. We know that. 
So this advice said illegally move this material.
  Now, when we had a hearing in our subcommittee, the Subcommittee on 
the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, back in June, I 
inquired of Christie Todd Whitman, the former head of EPA at the time, 
I said, Governor Whitman, when you were administrator of EPA, if you 
were told that some company or some individuals who were not trained to 
do so were removing asbestos-containing material, what would you do?
  She said, We would certainly have arrested them.
  I said, If you were told they were disposing of that material in the 
garage, in the regular garage, what would you have done?
  We would certainly have arrested them, she said.
  But EPA and the City Department of Health put on their Web site the 
advice to do exactly that to every individual who saw the World Trade 
Center dust in their own apartment.
  So this was illegal advice, but it was also unsafe advice. It was 
also unsafe

[[Page H10507]]

advice because if you remove asbestos-containing material without 
wearing proper respiratory protection, you are guaranteed to inhale 
some of that, and that's poison. That's toxic. Not to mention all the 
other toxins that we know were in that dust. And, also, if you are not 
trained properly how to do this, you are not going to do a thorough 
job. You may think you have cleaned your apartment or your office, but 
the material is still going to be in the drapes. It's still going to be 
in the carpets. It's still going to be in the porous wood surfaces. 
It's still going to be in the HVAC system. It's still going to be 
behind the refrigerator or the stove. And every time the baby crawls on 
that carpet for the next however many years, the baby is going to 
release some into the atmosphere and is going to inhale it. So these 
indoor spaces are unsafe to work or live in. And we are daily poisoning 
people.
  How many such spaces? Tens of apartments, hundreds of apartments, 
thousands of apartments, tens of thousands of apartments? We don't 
know. Over what geographic area does this spread? We don't know because 
EPA, the Federal Government, never did any proper testing.
  Now, they say they did testing, but the EPA's own Inspector General 
says it was nonsense. The EPA says it did a cleanup in 2002, an indoor 
cleanup, on a voluntary basis of several thousand apartments. But the 
EPA's own Inspector General said it was a phony cleanup for any number 
of reasons I won't go into now. And every time that anyone qualified 
has looked at this, they have labeled what has been done hazardous and 
phony.
  At my request, back in February and March of 2002, the EPA's 
ombudsman held public hearings in lower Manhattan to talk about the 
indoor contamination to examine this. What did the EPA do? They 
dismantled the ombudsman's office after telling people not to attend 
the hearing. The EPA Inspector General released a report in August of 
2003 labeling the EPA's actions atrocious and its cleanup phony. What 
did the EPA do? It ignored the recommendations.
  Under pressure from Senator Clinton and myself and others, the EPA in 
2004 formed a scientific advisory panel to look into this and to advise 
us what ought to be done. But when the scientific advisory panel of 
people hand picked by the EPA started coming to the conclusions similar 
to what I have been stating here, what did the EPA do? Did they listen? 
No. They dismantled the panel and they didn't permit them to issue a 
report. The administration has promised us reports; we haven't seen 
them.
  What has to be done? What has to be done is what the Inspector 
General recommended 4 years ago. What the Inspector General said was 
that there has to be active testing of indoor spaces, several hundred 
indoor spaces, in concentric circles from the World Trade Center. Why 
concentric circles? To see how far the contamination expanded and still 
exists.
  Now, the EPA, when they talked about their cleanup, they established 
an arbitrary line. They said, We consider that the problem is limited 
to lower Manhattan below Canal Street, as if there were a 30,000-foot-
high wall at Canal Street blocking the plume from going north of Canal 
Street, as if there were a 30,000-foot wall across the East River and 
the Hudson River protecting New Jersey and Queens and Brooklyn. Well, 
I've never seen any evidence of that 30,000-foot wall. We have to 
assume that the toxins went in these places too. We have to find out 
where they went. That's why the Inspector General instructed us that we 
should properly inspect several hundred indoor spaces, randomly 
selected indoor spaces, in concentric circles from the World Trade 
Center to see where the contamination extended to. And it may be that 
in one direction it extends three blocks and in another direction three 
miles. It may be, as I said, that we are talking about a few hundred 
apartments or tens of thousands. We don't know. But wherever that 
extended, wherever the tests in the concentric circles show that those 
toxins are present indoors, we must draw lines on the map, and then we 
must go into every single building in those geographic areas, however 
small or large the areas may be, and professionally clean them up. This 
may take several hundred million dollars; it may take several billion 
dollars. We won't know the extent of it until we do the testing. But as 
long as we don't do that testing, we have to assume, from everything we 
know, that hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people 
are being poisoned daily and will come down 10 years from now with 
mesothelioma, with lung cancer, asbestosis, and other dreaded diseases 
because they are living or working in contaminated environments.

  And we know something else about these kinds of contaminated 
environments. We know the effects of the toxins are cumulative. That is 
to say, if you waved a magic wand tomorrow and cleaned up all the 
contaminated indoor spaces, a certain number of people, we don't know 
how many, we don't know whom, but a certain number of people, because 
of the failure over the last 6 years to clean up these indoor spaces, 
because they worked there for 6 years, are unavoidably destined to come 
down with these dreaded diseases because we didn't clean it up 6 years 
ago. But if we don't wave that magic wand, if we don't conduct a proper 
cleanup, then a much larger number of people will come down with lung 
cancer, mesothelioma, asbestosis, and so forth 10 and 15 years from 
now. And the liability, the tort liability, of billions, tens of 
billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars, will mount up and 
mount up.
  Now, this second coverup is still covered up in the sense that the 
government doesn't admit the problem. On the first coverup that 
thousands of people are sick, almost nobody denies it anymore. We know 
that. The only question is what we do about it, and I spoke about that 
a few minutes ago. We should make sure that people are plugged into 
centers of excellence and networks and we should pass legislation 
affording them long-term health care, monitoring and services. But this 
problem that we still have, people who will come down with these dread 
diseases unnecessarily because they are being exposed on a daily basis 
to World Trade Center toxins that were never cleaned up, this is still 
unadmitted by the EPA or by the Federal Government.
  Mr. Speaker, if we are going to be true to what we have said about 
the heroes of 9/11, if we are going to be true to what Abraham Lincoln 
said when he said that it is our duty to care for him who shall have 
borne the battle, we must do two things: We must provide for the long-
term monitoring and health care by passing the bill that Carolyn and 
others and I introduced yesterday. We must also demand that EPA 
implement a proper indoor testing and cleaning program. Not a cleanup 
that the EPA's own scientific advisory panel says is a joke and a 
fraud, not a cleanup that the EPA's Inspector General says is woefully 
inadequate, but a proper cleanup to test buildings thoroughly, to test 
for all pollutants, not just for one or two, and that is not limited by 
arbitrary geographic boundaries in a way that allows the EPA to 
minimize its responsibility.
  Mr. Speaker, for the past 6 years, we have demanded that the EPA, 
that this administration, fulfill its legal mandate to protect the 
public health by telling the truth about post-9/11 air quality and by 
implementing a scientifically sound testing and cleanup program to 
address indoor contamination. They have absolutely failed on both 
fronts. The Federal Government has incurred a heavy moral liability 
because the blood of many of the people who will die early because of 
these diseases lies on the hands not only of the terrorists but of the 
administration officials who lied to the people about the conditions 
and therefore caused people to work in unsafe environments and who are 
continuing to allow people to work today in unsafe environments. If we 
are to be true to the survivors and the heroes of 9/11, we must learn 
something of this nightmare so that, God forbid, if there is a 
disaster, natural or manmade, we will protect the innocent rather than 
allowing our malfeasance and carelessness to shorten the lives of 
thousands of people.
  Now, when we have talked about this in the past, some people have 
said, and Christie Todd Whitman, the former administrator of EPA has 
said, the fault for all the people who are suffering and dying is the 
fault of the terrorists. Of course that is partially true. If the 
terrorists hadn't attacked us, none of these people would be sick.

[[Page H10508]]

  But it is the job of government and of government officials to 
minimize damages, to mitigate damages, to make sure that the number of 
people who get sick and die because of a terrorist attack is the fewest 
possible. Not to act in such a way that thousands of people who would 
have been fine had it not been for the malfeasance of government are 
not going to be fine. So for that it is the terrorists' fault but it is 
also the fault of these government officials. And that is another 
reason why the government has a heavy moral responsibility to clean up 
the indoor environment so that people stop being further exposed to the 
toxins so that we put a halt to further numbers of people getting sick 
from this. And, secondly, the government has a heavy moral 
responsibility to help those who have lost their jobs because they can 
no longer breathe, who are getting sick, who are sick, to minimize 
their damages by making sure that their health care is not a problem, 
by enacting legislation to provide for long-term health care and 
monitoring.
  So I thank you for yielding to me. I hope that these rather harsh 
words but realistic words and absolutely truthful words will get some 
response from an administration that has been completely callous toward 
the survivors and has paid only lip service toward the survivors, and I 
hope that we can redeem the moral values that we all share on behalf of 
the Federal Government by doing the right thing in the future on this 
if we have not done so in the past, which we have not.

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