Industrial hygiene principles and practices

911 Recovery

Health and Safety Plan for 911 Recovery Operations:

Lessons Learned

Recommendations on Industrial Hygiene

According to the Office of Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), industrial hygiene (IH) is of utmost importance to any work site. By definition, IH encompasses the science and art "devoted to the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of those environmental factors or stresses arising in or from the workplace, which may cause sickness, impaired health and well-being, or significant discomfort among workers or among the citizens of the community."

From this definition one can thus agree with the first sentence, namely that the fact that IH must be present at a work site and the fact that this is of utmost importance, and should never be ignored, especially in light of the fact of the consequences of such an action, which can have a negative impact on workers.

OSHA further states, in relation to recommendations on IH, that there is a long history of this concept being present in the workplace, and many instances can be seen. For instance, recommendations are plenty in three landmark cases passed by Congress that focus on safeguarding worker health:

1. The Metal and Nonmetallic Mines Safety Act of 1966,

2. The Federal Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969, and

3. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act).

It must further be noted here that, because of such cases, every employer is required to implement industrial hygiene elements in his workplace in order to ensure safety, occupational health, and hazard communications.

With regards to specific recommendations, industrial hygienists must undertake various evaluations of working conditions periodically. According to OSHA, this is done through processes such as developing or setting mandatory occupational and health safety standards, for example, which in turn, "involves determining the extent of employee exposure to hazards and deciding what is needed to control these hazards to protect workers."

Due to the fact that industrial hygienists' work is so valuable and necessary to today's work environments, especially in such sites as the site of the 9/11 attacks, these hygienists must do various things in order to ensure that their work is carried out properly. These checkpoints include anticipating, recognizing, evaluating, and recommending controls for environmental or physical hazards, according to OSHA. Furthermore, the organization states that 40% of its officers are qualified and hard-working hygienists, who are trained both to offer help and to develop policies that can ensure safety.

Health Hazards at the 9/11 Site

No workers should ignore the recommendations presented above on industrial hygiene, as safety in hazardous areas is the only way to protect oneself from disease and eventual death. Yet at the 9/11 site safety was not a top priority, and neither was industrial hygiene, as described and defined above. The destruction of the towers in the morning of September 11 brought a cloud of dangerous chemicals over the lower part of the island of Manhattan, and nobody suspected that what was in those dangerous clouds of smoke and debris would take a toll on many more individuals who both lived and worked in the area and at the site.

According to one website, the cloud rose over 1000 feet, and plunged the streets with darkness that lasted entire minutes. The cloud also deposited fallout over parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island, areas that are close to the lower part of the island. Yet the biggest threat was to those firemen and early response teams, as well to the workers who would dig up the site in the months following, all of whom would be, according to the same site to "an unknown cocktail of gases and airborne particulates."

Furthermore, research states that,

"In the days after September 11 the EPA and OSHA took air samples and reported that they found no excessive levels of asbestos, lead, or volatile organic compounds in the air, except in or around Ground Zero. Contrary to these reports, dust samples taken from surfaces near Ground Zero did show very high levels of asbestos. Significant quantities of asbestos had remained in the Twin Towers despite asbestos abatement programs."

The fact that such incredibly potent chemicals existed in an area where dozens of people worked, and the fact that this was not analyzed by hygienist and not publicized by the government is deeply disappointing. Due to the age of the World Trade Center towers, many should have realized how these were built (i.e. A mixture of asbestos and cement would have been sprayed on as fireproofing material) and the potential health hazards they would constitute, especially in the form of fumes still given off.

Occupational Medical Surveillance of Recovery Workers

It did not take long for recovery workers to report health problems. Yet it was not until November 2005 that one of the first studies was done on the health problems of these workers, by a Dr. David Pezant of the Albert Einstein College of medicine, who reported on the lung function of 12,079 firefighters who worked at Ground Zero, and whose study found "rates of pulmonary function decline up to 12 times higher than normal in firefighters exposed to the dust-filled air following the destruction of the buildings."

The study also showed that "the average decline in lung function experienced by Ground Zero workers was equivalent to 12 years of aging."

To make matters worse, it was soon shown that Republicans in Congress blocked a bill that would provide health to everyone working at Ground Zero, based on cost issues. Whereas the Mount Sinai Medical Center had provided care to non-federal workers, federal workers were promised care under governmental programs, something they never saw, and something that prompted them, when they finally felt the effects of working at Ground Zero, to start lawsuits against the conditions in which they had been forced to work and which were not suited to industrial hygienic laws.

Industrial Hygiene Sampling Plan to Characterize Exposure Levels

To the disappointment of many, and to the anger of just as many, no such plan was enacted, despite mounting evidence that the Site was dangerous, and press pressure to do so. In one study, the following graph was created in order to show that during the first few months of the disaster, Ground Zero was fermenting with the potential to cause disease and death, which it eventually did.