Note Whitman's comments on Indoor Air Quality Standards

[Guest guest]

September 29, 2002

You Should Have Seen the Air in '53

By KIRK JOHNSON

dry, wheezing, watery-eyed cough became common. The number of emergency room visits climbed, and the theaters in Times Square went dark for lack of business. Smoke and haze drifted across the region.

Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11? No. It was November 1953, in the middle of a six-day siege of air pollution that fouled the region with a ferocity unimaginable by the standards of today's far cleaner air. Through one bad week, a stagnant stew of soot and lead and who knows what else killed or hastened the death of 25 or 30 New Yorkers a day, according to an analysis conducted years later.

Many people have probably forgotten how bad the good old days really were. But some historians, environmentalists and public health experts say that in thinking about Sept. 11 — and the broad consequences that are emerging for public health, government regulation and the science of air pollution monitoring — turning back the clock can be a revealing exercise.

November 1953 was a very important moment, in part — and here's where the apt comparison to Sept. 11 comes in, the experts say — because it illuminated in full fumbling glory how little science knew. Air researchers in those days were not even sure what to call the stuff that had descended on the city, let alone what health impact it had. (They tried the word "smaze," to describe the combination of smoke and haze, but it never caught on; smog had more punch.)

But within a generation of those first smog crises in New York and Los Angeles, the federal Clean Air Act had encoded into law not only the standards about what was safe to breathe, but how government could enforce the rules on the public's behalf.

Similarly, scientists after Sept. 11 have come up with a huge array of evidence suggesting that most residents of Lower Manhattan who were not directly involved in the rescue or recovery work at ground zero have little reason for long-term concern about their health. But the same doctors and researchers have been forced to acknowledge that because Sept. 11 was so starkly different from any past event, their reassurances are approximate, based on standards and comparisons that do not provide an exact fit.

Most of the horrors of New York's environmental past, they say, like the grim air episodes in 1953, 1962 and 1966, were chronic and cumulative. Sept. 11 was sharp and sudden, but for most residents at least, relatively brief. Most past events had a thousand sources and causes — a vague diffusion of responsibility that made no one responsible. Sept. 11 had one source and one cause: the smoking, reeking, dust-blown ruins of the World Trade Center.

"There are chronic disasters that dwarf 9/11, but this is the largest acute environmental disaster to ever befall New York City," said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of the department of community and preventive medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan.

Dr. Landrigan and other experts say that because most pollution research has focused on chronic day-after-day exposure, hard knowledge about the health consequences of intense brief pollution encounters is a hole in the medical library. Before Sept. 11, it never really came up. He and other experts stress, however, that the anecdotal evidence is very strong for things like asbestos that brief exposures hardly ever result in disease, and that, judging by air test results, most residents were probably only minimally exposed, if at all.

But the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman, told a Senate committee this week that her agency was still, a year later, trying to come up with indoor residential air quality standards so that contractors who began testing apartments in Lower Manhattan this month could know how to interpret what they found.

The pattern, public health historians say, is unmistakable — watch for those moments when knowledge hits the wall, then stand back. Things will change.

"We are constantly building worlds that end up being dangerous, and all the turning points in public health are the times when we realize that," said Rosner, a professor of history and public health at Columbia University. "This is one of those moments."

Just this week, for example, state environmental regulators in New York announced that the construction vehicles involved in rebuilding Lower Manhattan would be retrofitted to burn low sulfur diesel fuel to reduce air emissions. The idea, which had been pushed for months by groups like Environmental Defense and the American Lung Association, arose in part from a scientific fumble last fall by researchers who attributed some high pollution levels downtown to the smoldering ruins at the trade center. Reworking through the data, they found that the ordinary diesel trucks idling in the street waiting to haul away the debris were the real cause.

But not just science hit a bumpy patch after Sept. 11. Many Lower Manhattan residents have simply refused to believe the results from the hundreds of thousands of air samples that were taken in the months after the attack. The vast majority of the tests showed that even as close as a few blocks from ground zero and within a few days of the attack, things like asbestos were barely detectable.

One resident of Little Italy who came to a public hearing earlier this month at Borough of Manhattan Community College to listen to the medical community talk about the disaster's aftermath cheerfully said she did not believe a word of it. The doctors, she said, had been corrupted by pressure from property owners who feared a collapse in real estate values. And so another wall emerged, and perhaps another cycle of history: If the air pollution victims in 1953 were in the dark because they couldn't know, some Manhattan residents now are perhaps just as in the dark because of what they cannot accept.

Some environmentalists say that people are right to disbelieve — not because science failed them, but because government officials did in communicating what scientists did not and could not know.

"The public would have understood the inability to answer health questions with certainty if it had been openly and fully discussed," said A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based conservation group. "But the response after Sept. 11 was more of the Soviet style, to deny there was a problem."

Mr. Goldstein said that he definitely saw a wave of environmental reforms emerging from the disaster. A crucial one that his group will work for is to make sure that independent scientists are included from the beginning in the assessment of any future disasters — not because government scientists will lie or are incompetent, he said, but because their conclusions will not matter if no one believes them.

Other researchers say that broad shifts in how society thinks about the environment are unlikely to emerge from one event — even one of the magnitude of Sept. 11. The beginnings of the environmental movement in the 1960's and 1970's, they say, were tied to a whole raft of forces, as was the general decline of the issue as a social and political force in the 1980's and 1990's.

"Generally during times of wealth and security, environmental concerns tend to drop," said D. Mehta, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada who studies environmental attitudes.

Wealth and security are hardly the words that most people would use to describe the world after Sept. 11, and Professor Mehta thinks the end of the 1990's culture — in lifestyles and economics — and the awakened connections between the environment and public health that have emerged after Sept. 11 in New York will eventually mark a turning point.

"I don't think it's quite arrived yet," he said. "But Sept. 11 contains the seed."

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