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Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the WorldTrade Center Collapse. By Juan Gonzalez. New York: Verso,2003. Paper, $13.95. 160 pp.

Jim Young

JIM YOUNG is special projects director, New Jersey Work Environment Council and Editor, GreenLabor.

WorkingUSA, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 2003, pp. 100–102.© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISSN 1089–7011 / 2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

REVIEW

Imprinted in our country’s collectivememory is the nightmare vision oforange flames and black plumes ofsmoke spewing from two planes ex-ploding inside the World Trade Cen-ter on the morning of September 11,2001. These initial images were buta prelude to the bigger horror ninetyminutes later, when the Twin Tow-ers collapsed in a crushing heap,sending a monstrous toxic cloudchasing men and women around thestreets of lower Manhattan.

The events turned a dreamy, bright,late-summer day into hellish dark-ness—and the magnitude of the dam-age took months for the city, thenation, and the world to comprehend.

Those who were in Lower Manhat-tan that day can vividly recall thephysical threat they faced. Many wereimmersed in a near-black avalancheof pulverized glass, concrete, steel,transformers, office equipment, andeverything else that was crushed intodust when the towers came down.Toxics in this poison storm included

mercury, benzene, lead, chlorinatedhydrocarbons, dioxins, polychlori-nated biphenyls (PCBs), and asbes-tos. For a great number of downtownworkers and residents, the respiratorytroubles began at once: sore throats,shortness of breath, and what soonbecame known as “World Trade Cen-ter cough.” For rescue and recoveryworkers, these symptoms continuedfor months, and for some, they per-sist today. Many others live with thelooming fear that a now-dormantcancer will emerge sometime downthe road.

In Fallout: The Environmental Con-sequences of the World Trade CenterCollapse, author Juan Gonzalez exam-ines what exactly was in the dust andflames and smoke that erupted like avolcano over lower Manhattan onSeptember 11. A columnist for theDaily News in New York City, Gonzalezalso explores the health effects andwhat he calls the “toxic deception”by local, state, and federal officials tokeep the public in the dark and to

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keep the financial markets fromcrumbling. By rushing workers backinto lower Manhattan to reopen thestock market on September 17,Gonzalez argues, there was an enor-mous failure to provide adequatehealth information to the thousandsof men and women exposed in theinitial collapse and to the “rescue andrecovery” workers who continued totoil at Ground Zero, including thou-sands of firefighters, police, rescueworkers, and cleanup workers.

In the tradition of the best muck-raking about public and occupa-tional health, Gonzalez never acceptsthe party line given by governmentofficials regarding the health risks ofthe World Trade Center dust, smoke,and fire. From the beginning, hefaced hostility from his own news-paper over his disbelieving view ofthe government’s “all clear” alertsand his eagerness to report the truth.And the one editor who supportedhis work was eventually fired.

But overcoming newsroom poli-tics is not what distinguishes thestory of Fallout. Gonzalez deservesparticular credit for an investigationundertaken within the political cli-mate that took hold—and to a largedegree remains intact—after the TwinTowers collapsed. In the immediateaftermath, Gonzalez was among asmall number of New Yorkers rais-ing questions about the enormouslypowerful edicts issued by the wildlypopular Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, aswell as the much flatter assurancesfrom Christie Whitman, head of theU.S. Environmental Protect ionAgency (EPA). At the time, anyone

who was openly skeptical of themayor or the federal governmentrisked being accused of, at a mini-mum, impeding the healing process(including returning to work to getthe stock market rolling again) and,at worst, siding with terrorists.

Fallout contains a number of tell-ing revelations about the govern-ment’s downplaying of health risksto workers and residents. For ex-ample, Gonzalez reports that it tookseveral months for ConsolidatedEdison, New York City’s massive elec-tric utility company, to publicly re-veal that the collapse of Seven WorldTrade Center, a building that was alsopart of the complex, led to the spillof 130,000 gallons of oil, most of itcontaining low levels of PCBs. Thespill fueled underground fires thatburned for weeks and released highlevels of toxics, including cancer-causing dioxin, into the air.

Gonzalez also pulls the covers offEPA’s own double standards. At thesame time as the agency was issuingstatements sending “all clear” signalsto the public on September 13 and18, he reports, EPA conducted “ex-tensive testing for asbestos” in thelobby of its own building, half a milenorth of Ground Zero.

The heart of the indictment byGonzalez is against EPA. He assertsthat the agency’s early “everythingis OK” messages, although encour-aging to a jittery public, were know-ingly misleading. This was not onlybecause EPA knew of potentiallyalarming data about toxics, but alsobecause the health risks were notcompletely clear and EPA refused to

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come clean and admit that uncer-tainty to the public.

From the book’s introduction, theskills that make Gonzalez a great col-umnist are on display, including hisnose for news and his courage to faceup to authority. Within two weeksof the disaster, he began asking city,state, and federal officials a numberof searing questions, beginning withthe most fundamental: Is it safe tobreathe the air? But he also askedwhether EPA, the OccupationalSafety and Health Administration, oranyone else knew how exposure toall those toxics would affect thelong-term health of workers andresidents, including children, preg-nant women, and older people. Hequestioned who was monitoring thehealth effects on the rescue workersand ensuring that they were wearingappropriate personal protectiveequipment. And, finally, he asked whythe decision to reopen downtown wasmade so hastily, without answers toany of the above questions.

He heaps generous praise on anumber of crusaders who “refusedto be silenced,” including environ-mental attorney Joel Kupferman,who filed the first Freedom of Infor-mation Act requests to get the resultsof daily EPA testing, and U.S. Repre-sentative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).

But one of the book’s few weak-nesses is that it pays too little attentionto the nongovernmental programs toprotect workers besides the rescueand recovery crews, including tran-

sit workers, office workers, and im-migrant day laborers hired to cleaninside buildings in the area aroundGround Zero. These efforts were ledby local occupational health physi-cians from Mount Sinai MedicalCenter and Queens College as wellas the workplace safety advocacygroup called the New York Commit-tee for Occupational Safety andHealth. They included an immediatedevelopment and distribution of factsheets for workers and residentsabout health hazards, numerous in-dustrial hygiene inspections of con-taminated buildings, and later amobile medical van at Ground Zero—as well as labor-backed health moni-toring and safety training programsthat continue today.

After reading Fallout, it is impos-sible not to worry about the long-termcosts of the deliberate dishonesty ofEPA and others concerning the envi-ronmental and health impacts of theWorld Trade Center collapse. “It willbe many years before we get an accu-rate picture of the long-term healthimpact on Ground Zero workers result-ing from their exposure to so manytoxic substances,” Gonzalez says.

Sadly, the epilogue to Fallout is notyet written. When it is, it is likely toalso describe what the author refersto as “a second wave of victims”—the thousands of workers and resi-dents who may pay for the toxicdeception with illnesses and prema-ture deaths, many of which mighthave been prevented.

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