Downtowners suing feds

NY Post
By William Neuman
March 11, 2004

Downtowners suing feds over toxic 'lies'

Lower Manhattan residents and workers yesterday sued the Environmental Protection Agency - saying the feds told people to return to the area around the World Trade Center when the they knew the air was still full of toxins from the collapse of the Twin Towers.

"The EPA intentionally lied to thousands and thousands of people when they said, 'Come on back, it's perfectly safe to do so,' when in fact they knew it was anything but that," said Bert Blitz, a lawyer for the 12 people suing the agency and its former head, ex-New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman.

The legal papers were filed in federal court in Manhattan as a class-action suit, meaning scores of New Yorkers potentially affected by air toxins after the 9/11 attack could join in the suit.

Blitz said the suit does not seek monetary damages for victims, but instead asks the court to force the government to pay for long-term health monitoring for people exposed to post-9/11 toxins.

It also asks the feds to pay for a thorough cleaning of apartments and businesses in parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn within the plume of post-9/11 smoke and dust.

"The government, the EPA and everybody else attached to them misrepresented to the public that downtown New York was safe and could be reoccupied, when it wasn't safe, when it was filled with asbestos, lead and arsenic, the air was horribly and dangerously polluted and people have been getting sick," said Richard Shandell, another lawyer involved in the suit.

The lawsuit accused the agency and Whitman of "a shockingly deliberate indifference to human health."

It charged that many residents and workers now face potential long-term health problems.

The legal papers said the EPA ignored its own rules and made many mistakes in how it dealt with the aftermath of the terror attacks, including telling residents they could clean their own homes to remove toxins, rather than having them professionally cleaned.

The EPA said in a statement that it had not been able to review the lawsuit and could not comment on it.

But the statement added, "It is important to note that EPA staff performed remarkable feats in the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse under the most trying of circumstances," including air monitoring and cleaning of homes.