September 11th, six years later

I don't think I'm alone in noting that, in spite of the fact that six years have now passed, Ground Zero remains a big hole in the ground. When the terrorists who conceived the attacks met to plan it, I doubt they expected that they would be so successful. Through bickering and politics, we have taken their attack and stretched it into a six year ordeal. Let's lick our wounds and move forward already.

I'd also like to comment some on the health issues that are connected with the events of 9/11/01. A few years back, I attended a private screening of a documentary about the environmental pollution released by the towers' burning and collapse. The main point was that the EPA and other government agencies were negligent in responding to the asbestos and other hazards, and no one should have been allowed into the affected area until a full evaluation and clean-up had taken place.

In a vacuum - that is, ignoring everything else, I think that this is true. But we should consider what we're actually saying:
* Between ventilation systems and open windows, most or all of the buildings in the area were subject to contamination. In these buildings, most or all of the rooms would be subject, especially where a central ventilation system existed to move the contaminants within the building. So, we have to evalate every building, and every room. How many buildings are we talking about? let's say 500, to make math easy. How many floors did these buildings have? This varies widely, but on average, perhaps about 10. And on each floor, there might be a average of 10 rooms or other spaces that might need decontamination. So: 500 x 10 x 10 = 50,000 rooms to be evaluated.
* Evaluation of a room for a contaminant varies by contaminant, but the simplest, quickest method may be to use a swab to wipe down an area, then evaluate whatever has been picked up by the swab by visual inspection or dipping it into a developer solution. The whole process, from walking into the room, to pulling out the swab, to wiping down the area to be tested, to developing5it and walking out might take 10 seconds. 50,000 rooms x 10 seconds/test/room = 500,000 seconds to run a single test on all of the rooms.
* It takes time to move from one building to the next; say 1 minute to get from the last room on one building to the first room on the next. For 500 buildings, this yields 499 minutes.
* 500,000sec/60 sec/min - 8333.33 minutes; 8333.33 + 499 = 9832.33 minutes; 9832.33/60 min/hour = 138.89 hours; 138.89 hours/24hours/day = 5.79 days to evaluate all potentially contaminated rooms for a single contaminant.
* Contaminants of concern included asbestos, lead and other metals, dioxin, PCBs, volatile organic compounds, and no doubt others. Consider the EPA's report; these are the contaminants tested for. If we assume that each of the tests can be done serially, as a worker proceeds through the buildings, then we only need to add 10 seconds per test to our time estimate, so 40 seconds/room x 50,000 rooms = 2,000,000 seconds for testing. Adding in the 499 minutes to get from the last room of one building to the first room of the next, and doing the math as before, we now get 23.49 days of work, merely to evaluate the interior rooms. This does not account for assembling the people and equipment, does not account for any necessary training or set up of equipment once it is on site, does not account for evaluating roof tops, does not account for looking for human remains, does not account for assessing drinking water, does not account for any clean-up or abatement, does not account for the human needs of the people doing the work (eating, sleeping, etc). This also overlooks the fact that the air over southern Manhattan is often windy - unless buildings were shrink-wrapped as they were cleaned, they would be recontaminated by debris blown off of still-contaminated buildings. This also overlooks the reports of foul smells noted in upper Manhattan, which may have been associated with the WTC fire and collapse.
*Obviously, there would be more than one person doing the work, and we'd be looking at less than 23 days for the evaluations, but we still have to face the question: how long do we want to keep lower Manhattan closed? How long can we afford, as a city and as a nation, to keep lower Manhattan closed?

My point is not that the economic importance of reopening Manhattan outweighs human health, but we are a society that has limited resources, and the more time, energy, and material we spend on one need, the less we can spend on another.