The next round of 9/11 dead

Heartbreaking:

A retired, 34-year-old city police officer who spent hundreds of hours searching for Sept. 11 victims at ground zero has died of respiratory disease related to the cleanup, union officials said.

James Zadroga, who retired as a detective from Manhattan's South Homicide task force in 2004, is the first emergency responder to die as a result of exposure to World Trade Center dust and debris, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association.

"Although James is the first, unfortunately I do not think he is going to be the last," Palladino said Saturday.

Zadroga died Thursday at his home in Little Egg Harbor, N.J., officials said. Results of an autopsy conducted by the Ocean County (N.J.) medical examiner's office were pending.

But Zadroga had developed black lung disease and mercury on the brain as a result of working at ground zero, Palladino said. Zadroga spent 470 hours in the first month after the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the trade center in rescue and recovery efforts, working up to 16 hours a day at the site, Palladino said.

He developed shortness of breath and other respiratory problems in the months after the attacks, and retired on disability in 2004.

A majority of residents and ground zero workers tracked by several different registries monitoring the participants' health have reported worsening respiratory problems in the years since the attacks.

Zadroga, a 13-year veteran of the force, is survived by a 4-year-old daughter, his parents and a brother. His wife died of cancer in late 2004, Palladino said. A wake was scheduled Sunday and Monday and a funeral Mass on Tuesday in North Arlington, N.J.

Guys like Zadroga are the unsung heroes of 9/11 -- the guys who headed downtown in the aftermath of the attacks to work on the rescue/recovery effort. Whether these guys would have put their lives at risk in this effort had they known the dangers remains to be seen -- but if the Administration hadn't whitewashed the health risks, perhaps they could have taken greater precautions to ensure their own safety.

And let us not forget:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency's news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

"When the EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," the report says. "Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced . . . the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

On the morning of Sept. 12, according to the report, the office of then-EPA Administrator Christie Whitman issued a memo: "All statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC (National Security Council in the White House) before they are released." The 165-page report compares excerpts from EPA draft statements to the final versions, including these:

The draft statement contained a warning from EPA scientists that homes and businesses near ground zero should be cleaned by professionals. Instead, the public was told to follow instructions from New York City officials.

A statement about discovery of asbestos at higher than safe levels in dust samples from lower Manhattan was changed to state that "samples confirm previous reports that ambient air quality meets OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standards and consequently is not a cause for public concern."

Language in an EPA draft stating that asbestos levels in some areas were three times higher than national standards was changed to "slightly above the 1 percent trigger for defining asbestos material."

This sentence was added to a Sept. 16 news release: "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district." It replaced a statement that initial monitors failed to turn up dangerous samples.

A warning on the importance of safely handling ground zero cleanup, due to lead and asbestos exposure, was changed to say that some contaminants had been noted downtown but "the general public should be very reassured by initial sampling."

The report also notes examples when EPA officials claimed that conditions were safe when no scientific support was available.

The ground zero rescue workers were entitled to know the level of danger they faced at the site. It's all well and good to blame them, saying they "should have known" that the site was unsafe. After all, common sense would tell you that a destruction site like this would be one hell of a toxic stew. But I for one am not about to blame brave people who allowed their own sense of doing what's right to override their common sense in the days following 9/11 -- especially when the government they had every right to expect to be trustworthy lied to them about the risks.