Cough

Did the EPA under Christie Todd Whitman jeopardize the health and safety of downtown New Yorkers in order to assuage the nation that everything was okay after 9/11? According to Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, quite possibly. And her ruling yesterday to go forward with a lawsuit brought by downtown residents and school children against the E.P.A. and Whitman personally is a long awaited step toward finding out just what happened in those critical days after the attack."The allegations in this case of Whitman's reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks," Judge Batts said, "are without question conscience-shocking."I first heard about this story in August of 2003 when the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA released a report about the EPA's actions immediately after 9/11. According to the EPA's own report:"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. Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, 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."Since that report was released I have been waiting for the, pardon the pun, fallout. Because it is indeed unconscionable that Whitman or any E.P.A. official under orders from the White House would jeopardize the health and safety of New Yorkers in order to send a signal to the rest of the nation that the government had things under control when it clearly did not.