NYTimes.com Article: As 9/11 Cleanup Moves Inside, Residents Battle With Emotions

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As 9/11 Cleanup Moves Inside, Residents Battle With Emotions

July 1, 2002

By KIRK JOHNSON

The Environmental Protection Agency is to begin within the

next few weeks the mammoth task of cleaning and testing

thousands of apartments in Lower Manhattan that were caught

in harm's way last September by the ash and dust from the

World Trade Center.

But on the 31st floor of 310 Greenwich Street, about four

blocks north of ground zero, emotional residue from the

disaster swirls as much as the dust that people still wipe

from their window sills and from the clothes in their

closets.

And so what might seem a simple question - whether to

register for the federal cleaning, in a building where the

tenants' association is pushing everyone to get on board -

is anything but.

Some people think the cleanup is too little, too late.

Others fear that inviting the government in could dredge up

old anxieties they have tried hard to put to rest. Still

others struggle with personal problems that make it hard to

focus on issues of health and pollution that can feel

speculative and intangible.

This is the story of only one group of tenants: one floor,

one building, one slice of downtown life. There is no

science to their selection. They are not meant to be

stand-ins for New Yorkers, but only what they are - a

closely examined cross section, full of wrinkles and

idiosyncrasies.

There are two office workers, a photographer, a nurse, an

educational therapist and an interior designer. Four are

white, two are black. Most are in their 40's and 50's, and

one is a woman of a certain age who smiled sweetly and

refused to say.

What they have in common is that their decisions on the

E.P.A. plan are tied to the strange emotional journey that

began for them and thousands of other downtown residents

nearly 10 months ago. Living in the shadow of a

catastrophe, many have felt the ground shift beneath them

as their beliefs and what they want from their lives

changed.

Based on the evidence so far, many scientists still expect

the health consequences to be minimal for most residents.

But unanswered questions about those consequences have

become another piece of emotional baggage tagged with the

phrase " too soon to tell. "

Along the way, the residents also bonded as never before,

through shared bottles of wine in the bleakest hours and

long climbs up the 31 flights in the days after the attack,

when the building was without electricity.

" We've been through this together, " said Virginia Clammer,

who is one of 90 tenants' association floor captains in the

three-building complex, known as Independence Plaza.

" That's changed us. "

But the story of the group also illuminates how difficult,

if not impossible, it will be for buildings like this to

achieve anything like unanimity about the E.P.A. plan - a

major goal of many politicians and tenant organizers who

say that a building only partially cleaned is not clean at

all.

There are subtenants on other floors at 310 Greenwich who

are considered unlikely to participate out of fear that a

government application form may somehow reveal their status

to the landlord. And there are people, as there are

everywhere, who simply don't want to be bothered, least of

all by the government.

Of the roughly 20,000 apartments south of Canal Street that

are covered by the plan, only about 2,500 have signed up in

the four weeks since registration began, according to the

E.P.A. Ms. Clammer estimates that tenants of only half of

the 11 apartments on her floor will participate.

E.P.A. officials say cleaning a typical two-bedroom

apartment will take two or three days, plus another day for

environmental testing, and that the work will probably

start by the third week of July.

Some 31st-floor residents say there is a psychological

barrier that stops them. Having their apartments cleaned so

long after the fact would require them to open doors that

were closed, they say, and to ask again questions that had

seemed settled or buried.

What was in the air, and where did it go? Far from calming

fears - the E.P.A.'s officially stated intent - the program

is having the opposite effect on some people, who say that

their careful compartmentalization of terrors would be put

at risk.

" I'm a person who worries about the least thing, but if I

put it in the back of my mind, then I don't have to worry, "

said Couttien, who has lived on the 31st floor for

four years as a full-time nurse, caring for an elderly

woman.

Ms. Couttien cleaned vigorously after Sept. 11. She

stripped the wallpaper in the kitchen and removed every

inch of carpeting - laboriously cutting it into strips with

a razor to roll up and take to the street. But after

glancing in a closet, she saw the shadow of dust on the

clothes and stopped. She closed the door and has not opened

it since.

Finding and cleaning the hidden, private corners of

downtown life is what distinguishes the E.P.A. plan. Unlike

the ground zero cleanup, with its engineering teams and

solemn ceremony, this time the government is going inside -

to the intimate and fragile places that people call home.

Mozella Gatewood

Mozella Gatewood's possessions sit

clustered in the middle of her living room, as they have

for months.

Although her apartment has been professionally cleaned

twice and painted, her furniture reupholstered and her

mattress replaced, she can't bring herself to put things

back. That would mean saying that it's O.K. to resume

ordinary life, she said, and she's not ready for that. A

new rug sits rolled up by the door, still in its plastic

sheath.

" I swear it looks like a furniture store, " said Ms.

Gatewood, an effusive 51-year-old temporary office worker.

" It's like, all in the middle. I buy stuff and I put it

right by the front door in the bag and I dig stuff out of

the bag. "

She said she knows other people who are in the same stalled

spot - they've cleaned and cleaned, thrown out the things

that felt dangerous to keep, and yet it's never quite

enough. " We can't pull it together, " she said. " We just

can't put our stuff back - I don't know why. I think maybe

it's a mild form of depression. "

Ms. Gatewood, born and raised in South Ozone Park, Queens,

has lived in TriBeCa for 23 years - one of the pioneers, as

many people at 310 Greenwich describe themselves, who came

here before it was trendy. She said she would definitely

register for an E.P.A. cleaning. But it worries her that

the government is coming so late to the game, after so many

months.

" They should have had somebody in Martian suits or

whatever, cleaning every inch, " she said. " I think they're

not ready for this, that's why I feel insecure. "

She's not sure when she might get her apartment back in

order. A flood upstairs earlier this year damaged part of

her floor, and once the floor is redone, perhaps it will

feel right to start over.

" I hope that's it, " she said.

O. Colliton and Colliton

O.

Colliton stood on his balcony, cursing and snapping

photographs as the boiling gray cloud from the collapse of

the south tower roared up Greenwich Street toward the

building. His wife, , pounded on his back and

screamed at him to take shelter. But Mr. Colliton, a

Vietnam veteran with more than a few war buddies in the

Fire Department who were surely down in the street or in

the towers at that moment, stood frozen.

Early on after the disaster, the Collitons resolved not to

take any help and they have no intention of registering

with the E.P.A. Their motives are complex. Mr. Colliton,

50, said he still retains a cynicism about the government

that dates from his experiences in the war. But they also

wanted to make what they called a " contribution, " to the

recovery, by not taking any relief money that was offered.

(Though they did accept $200 in compensation for the food

that spoiled during the 10 days they were evacuated.) They

bristle when they hear people in the building brag about

their vacations courtesy of the Red Cross.

" We wanted to move on, " said Mr. Colliton, a professional

portrait photographer who has a picture of Bill Gates on

the back of his business card.

Mrs. Colliton, 49, an interior designer, known as Jackie,

said she thought the relief money should be spent on people

and local businesses more directly harmed than they were.

" I think of myself as a survivor, " she said.

But on a recent evening, over a glass of wine in a

neighbor's apartment, where residents were meeting to

discuss the E.P.A. proposal, Mrs. Colliton said there was

also more to it than that. When the conversation turned to

questions about the future, she began to talk about the

couple's 5-year-old adopted son, , who is autistic.

She doesn't know whether he will be able to take care of

himself in a world that seems scarier than it ever did

before.

" My child doesn't talk, " Mrs. Colliton said. " I'm worried

if he's going to talk - that's what's on my mind. It's a

selfish little thing, but that's what I think about. " She

stopped, her voice cracking with emotion. Hands reached out

to comfort her. " It's like I almost have to deal with

things on a day-to-day basis, rather than thinking 10 years

from now that I might have some respiratory thing, " she

said. " In all honesty, I just feel, as far as the

environmental issues, it's not my priority. I do understand

where people can focus in on it, but I can't. "

Virginia Clammer

Virginia Clammer doesn't want to think

about things like silica, asbestos or dioxin. She said she

hates to even say the words because of what they conjure up

in her mind.

" There's only so much I can handle, " she said.

And yet,

there she was, sitting on her couch, gently undermining

every argument a neighbor could come up with about why an

E.P.A. cleaning made no sense. The neighbor's position was

this: since the government's outdoor air quality tests have

mostly shown there to be little reason for concern,

especially about asbestos, why go to the trouble?

" But what if they found other stuff, like mercury? " Ms.

Clammer responded, leaning in, her voice soft but

insistent.

The tenant responded that she would be shocked.

" What if

somebody who could focus in on it said, `We find asbestos

in the hall where your son plays,' Would you become more

active? " Ms. Clammer asked.

" Yes, " the woman said. " I would be more concerned. "

Score

one for the woman who doesn't want to know from pollution.

Ms. Clammer, 61, is an educational therapist who works

with dyslexic children and adults by day. By night, she is

a tenants' association floor captain, which makes her

something of a cross between platoon leader, cheerleader

and den mother to the people on her floor.

Several residents recalled how she walked up the 31 flights

with them through the dirty, darkened stairway to check on

a pet or grab some clothes when the building was closed.

When another tenant had no place to go during the

evacuation, Ms. Clammer found a bed in a friend's apartment

uptown.

Ms. Gatewood vividly remembers the night they were all

finally allowed to come home. The trade center was still an

open wound, smoldering down the street, and a shared bottle

of wine seemed like the only answer.

" We bent our elbows, " Ms. Clammer said.

" No, " Ms.

Gatewood said. " We got blasted. "

Ms. Clammer said that as the floor captain, she supports

the tenants' association position - that everyone should

register for the cleanup, but at the same time, complain to

the E.P.A. that apartment cleaning alone is an inadequate

response, and that rooftops, outdoor spaces and common

areas must be cleaned as well. She said she planned to

follow that advice herself.

Ida Werner

Ida Werner thinks there very well could be some leftover

dust and ash that was never cleaned from her apartment. But

her greater worry is whether she will have an apartment at

all in a year. That makes it hard for her to juggle the

various issues and arguments, and it has left her

completely at sea about the E.P.A.'s offer.

" Everybody is concerned with where they're going to live,

how they're going to pay their rent and how they're going

to get along day by day, " she said. " The environmental

stuff at this point is an abstraction - it's iffy. "

The three 40-story towers that constitute Independence

Plaza, which houses about 5,000 people, were financed in

the 1970's under a state program called -Lama,

which provided tax-abatements and controlled rents to

encourage the construction of middle-income housing in New

York.

But the law also allows owners to leave the program after

20 years by buying back the mortgage, and if that happens

here, many tenants fear the rents could triple or quadruple

overnight to open-market levels.

" A lot of us - we've been in here a long time, we enjoyed

this neighborhood, we made this neighborhood, we want to

stay in this neighborhood, " said Ms. Werner, who does what

she calls " light office work " at a small family-owned

company in Midtown Manhattan. " I'm afraid we could be on

the run. "

Ms. Werner, a Brooklyn native who declined to give her age,

said she sees a strange and bitter mixture in how things

have turned out: At a time when many downtown residents

became desperate to flee, fearful about the air and worried

about more terrorist attacks, she felt herself becoming

more and more desperate to stay.

During the evacuation, she said, she trudged up the stairs

to her apartment, partly just to see it and touch it, for

the reassurance.

" It took me a long time to get up to the 31st floor, " she

said. " My sister asked me if I was crazy, and the only

answer I could give her was yes. "

Couttien

Lillian Sirowitz, who is bedridden with Parkinson's

disease, mysteriously developed a temperature of 102

degrees on the morning of Sept. 11. For her nurse, Jean

Couttien, it was simply one more crisis to add to the day's

long list.

Ms. Sirowitz, 82, had to be carried down the 31 flights in

a chair by emergency workers later that day, and Ms.

Couttien said the woman's health has not returned. Fevers

and bouts of pneumonia are now more common.

Ms. Couttien's life, for reasons that she has pondered

deeply over the months, has revolved more and more around

Ms. Sirowitz's care.

" I've never really gotten my act together, " said Ms.

Couttien, 53, whose voice retains the musical intonation of

her native Trinidad. " The only thing I do good is my job. I

take care of Lilly and the rest of my life is just. . . . "

her voice trailed off. " I'm supposed to have classes that I

go to. I've paid the money. I went two days, but then three

months went by and I hadn't been back. "

Whether an E.P.A. cleanup makes sense or not, Ms. Couttien

said, hangs entirely on the question of whether it would

help or harm her patient. If there are contaminants in the

apartment that are making Ms. Sirowitz sicker, they should

definitely be removed, Ms. Couttien said. But the question

is how to weigh that against the stress and disruption of

another hospice stay, given the impact it had the last

time.

Ms. Couttien said that in some ways, caring for Ms.

Sirowitz is perhaps a selfish thing - an escape from the

world. There are direct, physical things that have to be

done, day after day, hour after hour, leaving little time

to brood.

" Sometimes I want to go out there and go for a long stroll

and not think, " she said. " Anyway, thinking about it - what

is that going to do for us? "

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/nyregion/01CLEA.html?ex=1027521451 & ei=1 & en=787\

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