THE TIME IS NOW TO SUPPORT HEROES OF 9/11 -- (House of Representatives - September 06, 2007)
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Mr. NADLER. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I must say that I am from the Upper West Side, not the Lower East Side, although my district does cover part of the Lower East Side, and that is certainly no insult.
Mrs. MALONEY of New York. We are all in it together, East Side, West Side, all around the town. All around the Nation, really.
Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I do thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I want to thank her for her leadership on this issue. I am pleased that we will soon be introducing legislation together to provide long-term health care to all the first responders, residents, area workers and students who have become sick as a result of the collapse of the World Trade Center. Our legislation will build on the efforts of the Centers of Excellence of New York City and will extend to people who came from all over the country to aid in the massive rescue and recovery effort after 9/11.
When the World Trade Center collapsed on that sunny morning 6 years ago, a plume of poisonous dust blanketed lower Manhattan, and not just Lower Manhattan, but parts of Brooklyn and possibly Jersey City, too. The cloud was a toxic mixture of lead, dioxin, asbestos, mercury, benzene, PCBs and other hazardous contaminants that swirled around the site where the World Trade Center once stood. The cloud blanketed the area as rescue and recovery workers worked around the clock. Many did so without adequate or without any protective gear. Thousands of first responders inhaled this poisonous dust before it settled onto and into countless homes, shops and office buildings in the area.
For the past 6 years, we have demanded that the EPA 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.
While America watched these brave men and women working fearlessly at the World Trade Center site, their government failed them and continues to fail them. As the Nation and the world united in solidarity, our government, this administration, put politics over science and safety.
Federal law mandates that when there is a terrorist attack in which toxins are released into the air, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have specific responsibilities. EPA is charged with the cleanup and is the lead agency to deal with the pollution. The American public deserves to know why and how that did not happen. We are getting some answers though, painstakingly.
As Chair of the Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, I chaired a hearing in June on the failures of the Federal Government in responding to the environmental crisis that resulted from the World Trade Center attacks. Senator Clinton held a companion hearing in the Senate. At the hearing we heard for the first time from Christine Todd Whitman, the former administrator of the EPA, who said her agency did nothing wrong, that they were honest with the public and that they listened to their scientists. But we know that EPA lied and to this day continues lying. We know that early tests revealed high levels of asbestos and other toxins and that EPA in statements vetted through the White House misled the public with their assurances that the air was safe to breathe. Independent scientists who testified in the hearing said that no amount of asbestos should be considered safe and that everyone knew that those buildings contained asbestos, hundreds of thousands of pounds of it before the buildings collapsed and released it into the air.
Indeed, there is no doubt that thousands of people are sick as a result of the contamination at the World Trade Center. Thousands of people are sick who would not be sick today if they had not been lied to by their own government and worked without protection on the pile for 13 and 14 and 15 weeks.
A study by Mount Sinai Hospital found that 70 percent of the more than 9,000 first responders who were studied suffered health problems related to their work at Ground Zero. These health problems include things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, interstitial lung diseases and reactive airway disease.
A recent New York Times article highlighted the clear link between the World Trade Center dust and life-threatening diseases. The article cited the report from doctors from the Fire Department of New York and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which again confirms what we have known for years, that we are facing a major health crisis as a result of September 11.
These studies do not even address the students at Stuyvesant High School and the Borough of Manhattan Community Colleges, schools that sat near piles of debris from the Towers, the nearby residents' apartments still contain poisonous dust or the thousands of people that work in offices that were never properly cleaned. These factors combined present an unprecedented challenge to public health not just to New York City but across the country.
In the days and weeks after 9/11, workers and volunteers came from across the country to help. The great citizens of this country came together, but the Federal Government has failed in its obligations. To this day there has been no comprehensive testing and cleanup of the affected areas, and to this day, there is no adequate provision for long-term monitoring of health care of the people who suffered in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster.
Now we are making, finally, small strides in providing health care to those who became ill. The emergency supplemental appropriations bill passed earlier this year because of the efforts of Mrs. Maloney and myself and other members of the New York delegation included $50 million for 9/11 health needs. The 2008 House Labor-HHS appropriations bill includes $50 million for the World Trade Center monitoring and treatment program.
I was also extremely pleased to learn from Senator Clinton that the Senate appropriations subcommittee has included $55 million in their version of the labor appropriations bill. The Senate version of the bill includes funding for residents, offices of commercial workers, volunteers and students. I hope the House will follow suit in making Federal funding available for residents too.
But much more remains to be done. The estimates of the costs are not $50 million a year but starting at $198 million and expanding to $400 million a year as more people become sick in the next few years. And we need to develop a comprehensive approach to 9/11 health that includes residents, nonfirst responder workers and school children. We need to secure funding that is not subject to the yearly appropriations battle. We must commit ourselves to act and to help all of those who are still waiting. That is why we are going to introduce the bill that Mrs. Maloney referred to a few minutes ago to provide a long-term comprehensive
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funding source, a bill that I hope this House will consider.
But in addition, there's a second cover-up. I have always said there are two cover-ups conducted here. One about the health care disaster that followed 9/11; that cover-up has unraveled. In the last year with the
revelations of the Mount Sinai study, the New York Daily News reports and other reports that have come out, now everybody recognizes that first responders and residents are suffering, thousands and thousands of them, because of the air pollution after 9/11, because of the government lying to them and saying that the air was safe to breathe and therefore they didn't use respiratory equipment or they were there in the first place when they shouldn't have been, not the first responders, but residents who could have gone elsewhere. But that was one cover-up that has now unraveled, and we have been talking about what to do about it and how to provide long-term medical monitoring and long-term care for it, and that is the legislation we are talking about.
But there was and is a second cover-up, and that cover-up is the fact that the indoor spaces that were polluted were never properly cleaned up. A GAO report, which Senator Clinton and Mrs. Maloney and I unveiled yesterday, pointed out that the EPA to this day cannot guarantee that any single building, except for its own building which it cleaned up properly at 290 Broadway, other than that, they cannot guarantee that any single building in Lower Manhattan is clean today and does not contain toxins that are slowly poisoning people on and on.
The EPA never properly cleaned up, nor did the City of New York, indoor spaces. Nature cleans up the outdoor spaces. The rain washes the stuff away. The wind blows the toxins away. Nothing cleans up indoor spaces. The EPA Inspector General reported in 2003, it is 4 years ago already, that the so-called cleanup the EPA conducted in 2002 was a phony, that it didn't clean up anything adequately. And they said that what had to be done, the EPA Inspector General, was that the EPA should inspect several hundred indoor spaces, apartments, residences in concentric circles going out from the World Trade Center to find out where the contamination is, maybe 3 blocks in one direction, maybe 3 miles in another. And wherever they found the contamination, they had to go in and clean up every single building in those areas. That may cost money, but until that happens, the babies crawling on the rug 10 years from now or today will be poisoned. The people living in those apartments, working in those spaces, will be poisoned, and we will reap the bitter harvest 10 and 15 and 20 years from now with thousands of unnecessary and preventable cases of mesothelioma and lung cancer and asbestosis.
Mr. Speaker, it is our job to do two things. If we are going to be true to what we have said to the heroes and about the heroes of 9/11, we must do two things. We must provide legislation and funding for long-term monitoring and health care such as that that Mrs. Maloney and I and others have been talking about in the legislation that we are introducing. We must also prevail upon the administration, by legislation if necessary, to do the proper indoor testing the way the EPA Inspector General said, and then to do proper cleanup. Not a cleanup that the EPA's own scientific advisory panel says is a joke and a fraud, not the cleanup that the EPA's Inspector General says is a joke and a fraud, a proper cleanup that does the entire building, that looks at all pollutants, not just asbestos, that is not limited geographically to below Canal Street, but wherever the contamination went as scientifically determined.
These are what we must do. If we do these things, we are true to the survivors and the heroes, and we will learn so that, God forbid, when there is another disaster, natural or manmade, we will do it properly and we will not have thousands of people with preventable illnesses and shortened lives as a result of our malfeasance or carelessness.
So I thank Mrs. Maloney for arranging this special order. I thank her for her leadership and in bringing to all our attention the struggle and the continuing health problems caused by 9/11 and in helping to craft legislation to deal with it.
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