Someone Who Enjoys Their Work

I ran across this interesting profile of Thomas Cahill at University of California, Davis in Esquire magazine (in 1979, I graduated from the Environmental Toxicology program offered by UCD). Dr. Cahill leads the DELTA (Detection and Evaluation of the Long Range Transport of Aerosols) Group and led a key study of air quality at Ground Zero following the World Trade Center disaster. He was later quoted as saying,

"[t]he debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together the components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least six weeks,"

and had expressed the conclusion that the conditions would have been "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in immediately adjacent buildings, which was dramatically at odds with EPA’s finding at the time that the air was safe to breathe just days after the disaster. There was actually no evidence to support such a claim at the time (the White House had put EPA up to it to get Wall Street back up and running, according to EPA’s Office of Inspector General).

The story in Esquire was about a messenger bag owned by Eric Gillan, who was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. He ran for his life as the first tower fell, then

[a] block into my escape, I made the same decision that got Lot's wife into trouble: I looked back. A twenty-story debris cloud loomed behind me like something Godzilla would fight, and before I could blink or close my gaping mouth, the cloud hit me like a swarm of gravel bees. I was in it and it was in me.

In a few seconds, the sky soured from a pristine blue to yellow to brown to a profound black. Day turned to night. The sky vanished. I stood there in the darkness, my eyes on fire as grit and sand worked its way under my eyelids and into my nostrils, where I got my first whiff of September 11--eau de construction site, with hints of sweet burning plastic and notes of Jiffy Lube. I was being buried alive, right there in the middle of Liberty Street. For five minutes, I gasped for air, but my lungs would not fully inflate, because this was not air. I would've had better luck taking a handful of dirt and inhaling that.

Eric’s messenger bag essentially collected a grab sample of WTC aerosol moments after the disaster. Dr. Cahill:

"This is so exciting," he says to me, actually rubbing his hands together. "We have no other samples from September 11 except your backpack. It will give us a snapshot of what people were actually breathing, which will help the doctors enormously in knowing what to treat." He told me this over the phone, before I arrived from New York to witness the opening. Now, even with me standing there, one of the people who breathed in whatever he's about to discover, he repeats it. Exuberantly. "I'm sorry for you," he says, and he means it. "But I'm also delighted!"

The story was intriguing for me by showing the point of view of a non-scientist watching a scientist at work.

Oh, the dust in his messenger bag? Dry wall gypsum and concrete. Dr. Cahill assures him that the long term respiratory health risks were probably relatively low. So, it probably wasn’t as enlightening as all that.

When Cahill's done, I have a weird thought: Good news! About September 11! Not a lot of people can say that. I hang up the phone and decide to go for a little run around the outside of the building. It's approximately 20 degrees outside, but I'm too excited to sit behind a desk and get on with my life just then. The bogeyman is out of my closet. I'm not one of those people who is going to get sick from September 11 after all. Not yet, anyway. Sure, there are some things we don't know and may never know. Like the kids who grew up at Love Canal or under high-tension power lines, I might wake up in a few years with some unexplainable sickness, some crippling respiratory illness. What are you gonna do? For now, all I want is to feel the air rush in and out of my lungs.

As we know now, the story is different for a lot of people. According to a recently published report of the medical surveillance, approximately 40,000 rescue and recovery workers were exposed to dust and toxic pollutants following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the WTC. These workers included first responders, construction, utility, and public sector workers. Many of these workers, who were at Ground Zero for days, weeks or months without respiratory protection, have experienced long term respiratory symptoms (known as “World Trade Center cough”) and pulmonary function test abnormalities that persisted years after the attacks.