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New York Newsday
October 25, 2001
Questions
About Safety of Workers
By Dan Fagin. Staff Writer
Hundreds
of injuries to workers combing through the rubble at the World Trade
Center might have been prevented had the city been faster to require
proper training and equipment at what is still an "extremely
hazardous" work site, according to a sharply worded federal report.
"There is no excuse for what I saw," John Moran, an engineer and
industrial hygienist, said yesterday. Moran investigated working
conditions at Ground Zero in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks as a consultant to the National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences. The report he coauthored was released this week by the
institute, an arm of the federal National Institutes of Health.
"When I was up there was no evidence of any safety or health program
or plan. It's the worst site I've ever seen - extremely hazardous. Very
few of the workers were wearing even the most basic protective
equipment," said Moran, who was at Ground Zero from Sept. 22 to 27.
While there have been major improvements since then and the city is
completing a comprehensive safety plan for the site, Moran said many of
the violations - such as workers and visitors failing to wear respirators,
eye protection or even hard hats - are still occurring.
"There's been significant progress, but we're still a long way from
100 percent compliance," agreed Joel Shufro, executive director of
the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit
coalition of unions and safety and health activists. "This report
documents what we have been hearing and seeing for weeks."
Moran also cautioned that some hazards may actually increase as the work
continues. Workers will be at higher risk for respiratory disease the
longer they stay at the site, and exposures to asbestos may increase as
they dig into lower floors of the towers, where asbestos was used
extensively.
A Fire Department spokesman, Frank Gribbon, said conditions at the site
have improved greatly since Moran was there. "He
was there four weeks ago," Gribbon said. "There's a tremendous
difference week to week as to what's going on there. And there's a
significant difference between today and what was there four weeks
ago."
And the leader of the union that represents Fire Department supervisors,
who are responsible for enforcing safety rules at rescue scenes, denied
that violations were widespread. "I think as soon as possible the
site was stabilized. I've been down there every day and I haven't seen any
problems," said Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire
Officers Association. "Maybe OSHA found violations of which I'm not
aware."
Moran said, however, that observers from the federal Occupational Safety
and Health Administration have identified 1,002 hazardous
"incidents" at the site from Sept. 21 to Oct. 14. The incidents
range from failures to wear hard hats and respirators to hazardous falls
and dangerously rigged cranes. Those violations continued long after the
effort shifted from rescue to recovery, he noted.
Even now, however, OSHA has not tried to force compliance with its safety
rules because of uncertainty over whether it has the legal leverage to do
so at a rescue site controlled by the Fire Department, Moran's report
said. OSHA officials declined to comment on the report yesterday,
but several officials familiar with the issue said the agency is still
operating under the assumption that because the site is still legally
classified as an emergency rescue scene, OSHA cannot be anything more than
an adviser to the city.
The new report marks the first time a government agency has criticized the
city's management of the blast site. Presented this week at a meeting of
the American Public Health Association in Atlanta, the report describes a
chaotic and dangerous scene at Ground Zero in the weeks after the attack.
Volunteer and professional emergency workers - many working 12- hour
shifts day after day - worked amid swinging cranes, moving trucks, thick
clouds of dust, chemical fumes, precarious piles of heavy rubble and the
smell of decomposing bodies.
As a result, 995 injuries - ranging from blisters and nausea to fractures
and severe burns - were recorded at the site over just 11 days, from Sept.
14 to 25, the report said. "That's the worst injury and illness rate
from a site I've ever seen," said Moran, who said he has inspected
more than 250 major construction and hazardous waste sites in his 25-year
career.
While experts from more than a dozen agencies were on the site giving
safety advice, the report said there was no centrally organized effort to
make sure that workers were actually getting the training and wearing the
protection they needed. Moran said only the city, as the ultimate
controlling authority at the site, had the authority to force compliance
with safety rules. "This was the responsibility of the city," he
said.
Gribbon said yesterday that the early rescue work was inevitably more
dangerous than the excavation now under way, and added that the department
has been able to emphasize worker safety now that the focus has shifted.
Some of the protective equipment is indeed awkward and uncomfortable,
Moran acknowledged, and he said that amid the
adrenaline rush of an attempted rescue some safety rules inevitably fall
by the wayside. He added, though, that experience at other disaster sites
shows the rescue effort would not have been appreciably slowed by better
equipment or by giving rudimentary safety training to each of the more
5,000 people who worked at the site.
Staff writer Dan Janison contributed to this story.
© Copyright 2001, Newsday Inc.
Dan Fagin. STAFF WRITER, AMERICA'S ORDEAL / Questions About
Safety of Workers, 10-25-2001, pp A04.
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