Report: Death Toll Among WTC Rescue Workers Soars

Originally posted by NovusOrdoMundi


No, the only sensible option is to conduct accurate and complete tests of the air quality at ground zero and equip the workers with the proper safety equipment - based on the results of the tests - to allow them to work in the environment safely.

How long would the rescue and recovery effort have been delayed until these requirements were met?

What would it have taken to disperse the crowds of loved ones and volunteers who inundated Manhattan in the hours after the event?

Where would they have gone?

How would they have gotten there?

Who would have fed them?

Where would they stay?

Could you keep them there?

What were the realistic options?

Rescue workers on the day of the event:

reply to post by GradyPhilpott


Your questions assume faulty facts.

The lying continued well beyond the urgency of the crisis. They lied WEEKS and MONTHS after.

They lured people into a false sense of safety with respect to the health risks.

They LIED...because it was politically convenient.

(Hello, Grady, btw. Haven't seen you around in quite some time. )

[edit on 6-9-2009 by loam]

Originally posted by Vitchilo
Can the head of the FDA, Guiliani, Bush and all those responsible for lying to the firefighters and new yorkers in general about the quality of air after 911 GO IN FREAKING JAIL FOR MURDER PLEASE?

SOME JUSTICE FOR ONCE IN AMERICA?

i think here at ATS, we have to be aware that anyone willing to pull this off would not hesitate to kills off the whistleblower and their families. this is not the movies or TV show, this is real life. and those people are "dead" serious (pardon the pun) about keeping this secret.

let me ask any of you if this happened and you knew who did it, would you say anything if you were discreetly told that your whole family would be killed? it's one thing to risk your own life, but not your families.

Lucky for them it was "safe" to work at ground zero. They were in a hurry to remove the evidence.

Christy Whitman do you sleep ok at night????

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott
While the number seems high, there is no way of assessing the number without some collateral data. How many workers were there? What are the ages of those who died? What kinds of illnesses did they die from? Are these data reliable?

As to the air quality after the attack and blaming the government, what was anyone to do about the situation? Were they supposed to just cordon off the Manhattan until the dust settled?

And what does Van Jones have to do with this? Nothing.

When the facts are known it is likely that there will be those who died as a result of exposure to toxic substances released during and after the attack. An attack carried out by al Qaeda.

[edit on 2009/9/6 by GradyPhilpott]

To answer your questions, there were about 40,000 workers at the WTC recovery performing various jobs. The ages of the workers ranged from 20's to 40's, all very younge people. Too young to be getting weird and rare cancers.

Now so far, thats 800 plus deaths that we know of. It does not count the number of people who are now disabled, chronically ill requiring constant medical treatment. Mount Sinai hospital reports that half of the responders now need intensive, constant medical care.

And yes. They should have cordoned off Manhatten until they were positive the danger to the public and rescue workers was past. The place was a toxic nightmare. If it had been a nuke set off, or chemical weapons set off, would you be asking the same question? I hope not. Better to close the city off until they were certain that the place was safe to work in and inhabit, than to prematurely and carelessly reopen it.

Life and health is far more important than "business as usual".

USA Today

One of the rare disorders Among WTC Rescue Workers is Sarcoidosis and no one has identified the cause of the disorder.
www.medicexchange.com...
www.mesotheliomawatch.org...


How can you test for a toxin when the toxic cause is unknown.
it may be two or more non toxic materials that combine to create unknown toxin

I am a ex firefighter/EMT in calif that was DXed with Sarcoidosis in 2003 and likely had it for years before the cause of my strange symptoms was found to be Sarcoidosis.

This is a common disorder among firefighters that is without a known toxic link. and if you can not link it to a toxin how can you test for a toxin.

This is why some firefighter don't take chances and wear respiratory protection when ever there is any unusual material in the air,

I was one of the ones that did not take chances but i still got Sarcoidosis.

Originally posted by refuse_orders
This needs to be investigated, i live in the UK so i know it does not concern me directly but if this was in my country i would expect heads to roll! How the hell can this happen and nobody be to blame!?

Well, I live in the American southwest. Anything can be investigated, anytime, no problem.

The people of NYC seem to think they are sophisticated, like perhaps the people of London. If what happened to them on 9/11 is OK with them well then it is OK with me.

reply to post by ANNED


Because there are many other illnesses that cropped up, caused by known factors, such as asbestos, which is very dangerous stuff. My stepdad used to work in asbestos abatement. The get up they wore to remove the stuff made my old NBC gear in the army look nude. Asbestos, it was well known, was present in large quantities in the world trade center. Right there, given that much of the WTC had been reduced to thick clouds of fine dust that was all over lower Manhattan, should have set up alarms, and rescue workers should have been required to be outfitted accordingly.

Not to mention that all that dust also contained assorted chemicals and substances from the WTC. They were 2 buildings with 110 floors of office space. Office space contains office machinery like Xerox machines, computers, furniture, ect, which is made from plastics and electronic components, most of which contain very toxic substances, such as arsenic, lead, mercury, ect.

They weren't just breathing in concrete, they were breathing in everything in the WTC. The rescue workers should have been outfitted like spacemen, and they should have kept the effected areas closed off, not telling people to go back to houses that were basically filled with slow death.

It would have been extremely unpleasant and distressing for the residents and families, but better distressed and put out for a few weeks than to end up a couple years later coughing a lung up with 3 months to live.

reply to post by Skadi_the_Evil_Elf


(I know this is slightly off topic...but I'm stumped about something...Something really doesn't add up for me.)

I find your description interesting. But your characterization of the "toxic" mess from just two very large buildings forces me to wonder about a comparison to the presumed "toxic" mess left in the aftermath of Katrina.

Surely Katrina's New Orleans 'mess' was MUCH bigger than that of the WTC 'mess'.

Katrina devastated thousands of structures.

Yet I'm not aware of people getting sick and dying from that cleanup (FEMA trailers excluded ). In fact, I'm not aware of that generally happening as a consequence of clean-up after ANY previous large scale damaging event (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fire).

So when two very modern, highly managed structures (read 'clean') collapse, THEIR debris somehow results in an extreme number of deaths and disability years after exposure.

Why is that?

Again, why is that?



What made two+ buildings highly more toxic than the devastation of a very large city...of lots of previous cities?

Is the drier stuff somehow deadlier than the wet stuff?

If so, how was this dry stuff different from other dry debris left by massive damaging earthquakes?

Is it because we just haven't 'noticed' the long-term deaths from these other large scale "clean-ups"?

Was there something "special" about the WTC debris?

Any thoughts? I really want to hear a sound explanation for the distinction in scale and consequence between the WTC clean-up and other large scale structural disaster clean-ups.




[edit on 7-9-2009 by loam]

Here is an interesting site with WTC debris statistics and estimates:

Some Statistics

Various sites give slightly different results but the following figures seem to be generally accepted.

* Steel used in the WTC: 200,000 tons (I will use metric tons, not short tons. A metric ton is 1000 kg).
* Volume of steel (at 7900 kg/cubic meter): 25,300 cubic meters.

* Concrete used: 425,000 cubic yards concrete = 325,000 cubic meters
* Mass of concrete (at 2400 kg/cubic meter): 780 million kg or 780,000 metric tons

...

All That Dust

A couple of revealing studies have been done on the dust from the World Trade Center. One was by the U.S. Geological Survey (pubs.usgs.gov...). They measured the composition of the dust and found:

(CONT)

Link.

Compare with:

Frequently Requested National Statistics Hurricane Katrina – One Year Later

Debris Clean-up – 99 million cubic yards

More Katrina Statistics

Housing:

- 204,700 housing units in Louisiana were destroyed or had major damage. (FEMA)

Debris:

- Hurricane Katrina created 22 million tons of debris
- Hurricane Rita create 2.6 billion tons of debris
- 714,000 pieces of white goods (refrigerators, stoves, etc.) have been collected for recycling. (LA Dept. of Environmental Quality)
- Contractors have collected 2.5 million pieces of hazardous waste. (LA Dept. of Environmental Quality)
- An estimated 350,000 vehicles, most in the Greater New Orleans area, are waiting to be recycled. (LA Dept. of Environmental Quality)

Other:
- 18,700 businesses were severely damaged or destroyed. (BLS)

Confused as I am?

Still make no sense to me.

[edit on 7-9-2009 by loam]

reply to post by loam


On your katrina thing ... the reason its not as toxic is the water... the dust and things collected and were swept out with the water... not entirely clean but better than if 2 very large buildings collapsed on a dry day ... uhhh err lemme think ah yeah quick example have you ever seen a house demolished? as they break it down they spray it with a fire hose to keep the dust from rising. Just wanted to answer ur question

reply to post by skycopilot


817 out of how many total workers?

I could sit here and debate about hereditary diseases, possible contamination, and a series of other factors, but I prefer not to second guess the workers. They were there, I wasn't.

Reminds me of when I came back from the Gulf war and started to notice my hands shake a lot. I know something happened to me over there. My government says otherwise. Sometimes my left hand shakes so bad, I can't even hold a cup.

My best wishes to those rescue worker's and more importantly that the truth comes out.

They didn’t care killing 3000 of you to ensure they got the 'Arab' mentality across.
What makes you think they'd care about 900 people who were used as first responders to hide the evidence, dying?

Those towers were 'known' asbestos traps.

But the government couldn’t allow all that ripe and rich evidence of its crimes to lay across NYC's streets until the smoke cleared.

Look into the WTC Captive Fund. $1,000,000,000 was set aside to reimburse the workers who were injured, but instead the city spent over 75 million dollars of that money in 'loss adjustment fees', including over 47 million dollars in legal fees to fight the ground zero workers' claims. Since 2001 they have paid very little out. I can't find the exact amount but I think around 300-400k is all the workers have received in total to date.

Here's an article about it from 2007.

www.nypost.com...

of course this affects you, in the UK, it's a global conspiracy to subvert humanity.

all 6.66 billion of us are in the cross-hairs

Originally posted by refuse_orders
This needs to be investigated, i live in the UK so i know it does not concern me directly but if this was in my country i would expect heads to roll! How the hell can this happen and nobody be to blame!?

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott

Originally posted by NovusOrdoMundi

Abandon Manhattan?

Hazmat procedures would have been a good start, an asbestos warning to the crews would have been a good second and lastly some truth from the "air quality" people may have gone a long way to saving lives.

reply to post by LucidDreamer85


Could it also be they are taking them down one by one now? (See? being paranoid all the time has its benefits )

reply to post by loam


Interesting, Loam.

I would suspect one reason for the difference is of course, the nature of the destruction, and diseases. Airborne poisons and diseases are alot easier to get into your body than waterborne ones. Katrina destroyed with water, and the water in New Orleans was probably toxic as hell, but I would imagine that people were drinking bottled water, thus, avoiding contamination there. Katrina did not pulverize buildings and their contents into thick clouds of fine dist, but rather, swept away things in tons of water. The health hazards were very different.

In earthquakes, buildings collapse, but they and their contents are not turned into massive clouds of fine dust reminiscent of pyroclastic flows in volcanoes. I'm sure you see where I'm getting at: the old WTC progressive collapse vs controlled demolition arguement, which I will not get into here, because we have a forum full of those topics, and that debate is a side njote to this one.

But generally, inhaled toxins are alot more pervasive and harder to keep out than waterborne ones.

reply to post by refuse_orders


People from the UK died though...

So it does concern us directly, although obviously not as much as the US.

But then, we are all citizens of planet earth aren't we, and if something is done that affects a large percentage of the citizens of Earth, it affects us too.

One of the reasons you will find for the poor reporting is while there were approx. 4,000 first responders there were also 30,000 locals breathing the dust on a day to day basis.

Now what do you think will happen when people higher up the corporate ladder with a higher profile get sick?

Here is some more info from this site.

www.mesotheliomasos.com...
No one truly knows how much asbestos was released into the air that day and during the demolition of the remains of the two towers. The construction of the World Trade Center was begun before the use of asbestos was banned, so spray-on asbestos fire retardant was used in the lower floors of the towers. When the use of asbestos was banned in 1971, the towers were not complete so a different insulating material was used for the remaining floors and for the other buildings that made up the WTC complex, which opened in 1973. However, reports estimate that even though the upper floors used a different fire retardant, approximately 400 tons of asbestos fiber was in the buildings when they collapsed.

Many first responders suffered almost immediate health problems, developing what officials and doctors dubbed “The World Trade Center Cough.” One study showed that more than 85% of those who initially responded to the tragedy were suffering from some sort of respiratory ailment.

Those who’ve studied the potential hazard of asbestos caused by the collapse of the World Trade Center estimate that more than 110,000 people may have suffered serious exposure including 80,000 tower workers, 30,000 local residents, and 4,000 first responders.

These same reports show that in the haste to clean up the debris, proper precautions were not taken to protect workers from harm nor were standard and necessary asbestos abatement procedures followed. This resulted in even more exposure.