Giuliani's role at ground zero now under question
By Anthony DePalma
Monday, May 14, 2007
NEW YORK: Anyone who watched Rudolph Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, glimpsed elements of his strength - decisiveness, determination, self-confidence.
Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Giuliani's triumph of leadership as New York's mayor as having come with a human cost.
An examination of his handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center's ruins, Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.
Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Giuliani's administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced requirements that those at the site wear respirators, even long after the last survivor was rescued.
At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed.
Administration officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.
"I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose," said Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club, which has been critical of how the cleanup was handled.
"It wasn't people running around saying, 'Don't do this safely.' But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored."
City officials and a range of medical specialists are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing.
And although no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge, city officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The question of who, if anyone, is to blame for not adequately protecting the workers could finally be decided in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where thousands of firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence.
City officials have always insisted that they acted in good faith to protect everyone at the site but that many workers chose not to wear available safety equipment for a variety of reasons.
Giuliani has said little publicly about how his leadership might have influenced the behavior of the men and women who worked at ground zero. Giuliani, whose image as a 9/11 hero has been the focus of his run for president, declined to be interviewed for this article.
His representatives did not respond to specific questions about the pace of the cleanup, the hazards at the site and Giuliani's reticence to speak out about the workers' illnesses.
Moreover, many of the people who ran agencies for Giuliani or who handled responsibility for the health issues after he left office would not comment, citing the pending litigation.
In the past, Giuliani has said that quickly reopening the financial district was essential for healing New York and the nation.
The cost of Wall Street going dark was enormous. Giuliani has said he was forced to balance competing interests as he confronted a never-imagined emergency, and he has acknowledged that he and others made mistakes.
From the beginning, there was no doubt that Giuliani and his team ruled the hellish disaster site.
Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, all with extensive disaster response experience, arrived almost immediately, only to be placed on the sideline. One Army Corps official said Giuliani acted like a "benevolent dictator."
Despite the presence of those federal experts, Giuliani assigned the ground zero cleanup to a largely unknown city agency, the Department of Design and Construction.
Kenneth Holden, the department's commissioner until January 2004, said in a deposition in the lawsuit against the city that he initially expected the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Giuliani never let them.
In this environment, the mayor's take-charge attitude produced two clear results, according to records and interviews. One, work moved quickly. Although the cleanup was expected to last 30 months, the pit was cleared by June 2002, nearly two years ahead of schedule.
And second, the city ultimately became responsible for thousands of workers and volunteers while, critics say, its health and safety standards were lacking.
"The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns," said David Newman, industrial hygienist of the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.
Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In a deposition, Kelly McKinney, associate commissioner at the New York City Department of Health in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 that asbestos in the air made the site hazardous and that everyone should wear masks.
Many workers refused. No one wanted to be slowed down while there was still a chance of rescuing people. Later, workers said that the available respirators were cumbersome and made it difficult for them to talk.
Violations of federal safety rules abounded, and no one strictly enforced them. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration did not play an active role during the rescue phase, which is usually the case in emergency operations. But the agency remained in a strictly advisory position long after there was any hope of finding any survivors and at the point when, in other circumstances, it would have enforced safety requirements.
Agency officials said that enforcing rules and issuing fines would have delayed the cleanup and probably would not have helped much because contractors could have passed along the cost of the fines to the city.
In their defense against the negligence lawsuit, city officials have insisted that they cooperated with federal officials to develop an effective safety plan. On Nov. 20, well into the cleanup, contractors and city agencies agreed to follow safety rules, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration agreed not to fine them if violations occurred.
The agency ended up distributing more than 130,000 respirators. Workers' unions tried to get members to wear them, but usage remained spotty without strict enforcement of the rules.
"What they were doing on paper wasn't what they were doing in practice," said Paul Napoli, one of the lawyers representing the more than 8,000 workers who have sued the city for negligence.
