In August 2004, the Sierra Club issued a report entitled, Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero, which documented that many hundreds of people in New York City had become ill because of exposure to pollution from the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The report found that if our federal government had responded to the disaster with proper vigilance for people’s health, many toxic exposures could have been avoided. It also expressed concern that such missteps could be repeated in a future disaster. In this report, the Sierra Club revisits these issues to determine whether or not Americans should feel assured that our federal government will take sufficient steps to protect health and safety in future disasters. The answer is no.

Americans cannot count on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Department of Homeland Security, EPA or OSHA to protect public health in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or national disaster. Based on the federal administration’s new emergency management policies – and its continued failure to provide a proper cleanup and health management response to the 9/11 attack – Americans should assume that in any future national disaster, if political pressure is applied to resume human activity in the affected area:

EPA will fail to determine how harmful the contamination is and how far it spreads; also, under its new relationship with the Department of Homeland Security, it may use weakened toxic cleanup goals under a new federal “optimization” policy;

Under the new National Response Plan, messages to the public about health and safety will be filtered by centralized “PR” staff who answer to an administration that has repeatedly disregarded scientific data if it conflicts with a political agenda;

OSHA will not enforce safety laws to protect rescue and recovery workers – and under the new National Response Plan, OSHA will not have “the last word” in debates on worker safety;

The federal government will fail to conduct a proper cleanup of the contamination;

The federal Administration will praise, then abandon, the rescue/recovery workers and the people who return to rebuild the area but then suffer health effects; and,

No one will be held accountable for our government’s failure to protect the public from the aftermath of a terrorist attack or national disaster.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proposed the use of ‘optimization’ as the endpoint for final cleanup actions during recovery from a radiological or nuclear emergency. In this context, ‘optimization’ implies a process whereby societal values and needs are integrated with science-based risks and benefits to develop action options that can be evaluated for their acceptability to the public.