Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy

His leadership of New York city after the attacks of 9-11 is central to his campaign to now lead the entire USA. However, there are questions regarding whether Rudolph W. Giuliani was so keen to show that New York could recover quickly from the attacks that he took insufficient care regarding the dangers that workers cleaning up New York faced from the fumes that they working in.

“The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group.

City officials and a range of medical experts 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. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge.

Thousands of New York's firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence. The New York Times are running an article today concerning the amount of people who are now facing the future with breathing problems, an article that Giuliani has declined to be interviewed for.

Giuliani insisted that the work at Ground Zero had to be completed according to a strict timetable as the reopening of the cities financial district was essential to the to the healing of, not only New York, but of the entire nation. The question now is whether or not unnecessary risks were taken with worker's health in order to fulfil that task.

From the beginning, there was no doubt that Mr. 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 Mr. Giuliani acted like a “benevolent dictator.”

Despite the presence of those federal experts, Mr. 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 federal lawsuit against the city that he initially expected FEMA or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Mr. Giuliani never let them.

There was much to admire in Giuliani's "can-do" approach, not the least of which was the fact that a 30 month cleaning job was completed in just nine months. However, questions are being raised over whether speed was put before safety in the operation.

“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.”

Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In a federal court deposition, Kelly R. McKinney, associate commissioner at the city’s health department in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 stating 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 on, 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. OSHA 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.

Only 29% of workers at the site were wearing the sophisticated respirators that were required by OSHA. Indeed, even Giuliani himself was known to turn up on the site without one.

Giuliani became incredibly popular for his handling of this crisis where he attended the funerals of fallen fireman and called them heroes. However, he has not been anywhere near as visible when it comes to hearing's on the health of those who went to work to get New York back on it's feet.

John T. Odermatt, who was Mr. Giuliani’s deputy at the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said that Mr. Giuliani had to make many decisions every day during the crisis, but the priority always was “clearly more about people than getting the site open.” Mr. Odermatt, now speaking on behalf of Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, said he did not know whether the former mayor had ever lobbied Congress on behalf of sick workers, and the campaign did not provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s working to secure federal funds for treatment of ground zero responders. Many of those people are now sick, and they are angry.

Lee Clarke, director of health and safety for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees’ union, said Mr. Giuliani used “very, very poor judgement” in rushing to reopen the financial district without watching out for the workers who cheered him at ground zero. Ms. Clarke said that if those workers found themselves in a meeting with Mr. Giuliani today, “a number of them would be standing up, wanting a piece of Rudy.”

Giuliani will no doubt continue to avoid questions over whether he adequately insisted that workers protect themselves whilst they worked in dangerous conditions to ensure the reopening of New York's financial district, but the very fact that 70% of those screened who worked at Ground Zero now have breathing difficulties should be some form of stain on what America regards as his finest hour.

The truth is that the city did know that the air was dangerous and yet workmen were allowed to continue working without respirators.

Having taken the praise for what went right, indeed, having formed a Presidential campaign based on it, it is only right that Giuliani takes the flak for what went wrong on his watch. Thousands of people died on that day and there was very little anyone could have done to prevent it. However, thousands of people were needlessly made ill in the months that followed in circumstances that were easily avoidable.

It comes down to a matter of judgement. And in this instance it would appear that Giuliani's judgement was lacking.

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