Source: http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-usheal215264105jun21,0,5456654.story?coll=ny-health-print

Clinton condemns response to 9/11 dust

BY MARTIN C. EVANS

martin.evans@newsday.com; This story was supplement

June 21, 2007

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday chastised the Bush administration for failing to warn New Yorkers about toxic dust after the terror attack on the World Trade Center, but withheld criticism of the city's response under then-mayor and fellow presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

"Nearly six years after 9/11, we still don't have the whole truth about the toxic cloud of poison that filled the air after the towers fell," Clinton said yesterday at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health, which she chairs.

"We don't have an explanation for the misrepresentations that put countless people at risk of exposure to chemicals that we know are causing illness and death."

The chief of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, defended the administration's handling of the toxic cleanup, saying its response was "conveyed real-time in fast-moving circumstances."

"In all instances, federal agencies acted with the best available data at the time, and updated their communications and actions as new information was obtained," he said.

Since the attacks, independent government reviews have faulted the EPA's handling of the immediate aftermath of the attacks and the agency's long-term cleanup of nearby buildings.

An estimated 20,000 people live within a half-mile of the collapsed towers, including nearly 3,000 children. A study of more than 20,000 people released in September by Mount Sinai Medical Center said as many as 70 percent of Ground Zero responders developed a new or worsened respiratory illness.

Giuliani has been faulted for failing to enforce regulations that would have required responders to wear respirators.

A separate medical study released last month found that rescue workers and firefighters contracted sarcoidosis, a serious lung-scarring disease, at a rate more than five times higher than the years before the attacks.

Clinton and other New York lawmakers have sought to pressure the agency to do more to clean apartment buildings in lower Manhattan.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes Ground Zero, will hold a hearing next week to question former EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman.

This story was supplemented with Associated Press reports.