CBC - 9/11 Toxic Legacy: A Cloud of Dust (Part 1-5)

http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/toxiclegacy/index.html On a sunny morning in September 2001, more than twenty seven hundred people died violently in events of unimaginable horror. Another killer was unleashed that day. A slow silent poison that now threatens thousands of lives. the toxic dust and gases created by the disintegrating towers. An enormous compression wave pushed through the streets and into buildings with the force of a hurricane. The dust swallowed lower Manhattan and spread outward in a giant cloud. As everyone fled, rescue workers raced into the toxic brew. Paramedic Bill Dahl was among the many who rushed to the scene. "Within five minutes you couldn't see out of your eyes because they were caked. You found yourself spitting it out, trying to clear your nose and your mouth any way you could. When you breathe it in it burns your throat, it burns your nose, it burns your eyes and everybody coughed." That night Dahl says heavy winds turned the area into a giant sandblaster. Jim Gilroy and his family fled their apartment three blocks north of Ground Zero. He did what he could to protect his baby daughter from the dust. "She was screaming. You're wrapping a wet cloth around her head but she's not going for it. But I was still trying it. We were just like refugees out on the street." When Fire chief Jack Corcoran got to the site late that night, the air was still thick with dust. "There was no furniture, there was no glass, all that paper. Everything was either molten hot or pulverized. Anybody that was in that pile, I knew they weren't going to survive. There was no way they could get through that." At the White House, dust was not an issue on anyone's agenda that day . getting America back to normal was. President Bush told advisors that he wanted New York back in business -- by the next day if possible. But with thousands missing, the first priority was the search for survivors. Senator Hillary Clinton was one of the observers who were uneasy about the effects of the foul air on the rescuers. "I saw the firefighters coming out the haze and the dust, and looking not only exhausted but just covered from head to foot with soot and other debris, and I asked, someone who was there, I said 'are they using respirators, are they getting some kind of respite from this?' And I was told oh yes fine, you know, fine, don't need to worry about it." Concerns about the level of toxicity in the air were quickly allayed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Forty-eight hours after the towers' collapsed EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman spoke to the press from Ground Zero. "Right now we're not getting any elevated levels that indicate concern. We have monitored in Brooklyn, we are monitoring in what within a ten block area, in ten blocks of this area and again levels are all well below any indication of a health risk," she said. During those first few desperate days concern for their own health was not on the minds of the thousands of rescue workers who poured into Ground Zero. Among them was ironworker John Sferazo. As with so many others, he has never recovered from what he saw. "There's nothing like witnessing it, that eerie feeling of knowing that there's dead all around, that silence and smell of the death that took place." He and other rescue workers raced against the clock in the dust and smoke. "This is what most of us suffer the most from, being there to help and not finding any survivors but body parts instead.papers and smoke and tragedy. That the best way to explain it - horror. We were there. We were there for America."

YouTube | March 15, 2008

Tags:. .wrapping. .senator. .nose. .exhausted. .clock