Diane Van Dyke was standing with her husband Bob in the middle of their fourth-floor Stone Street loft and recording studio on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the building began to shake. They did not yet know about the hijacked airplanes -- they just felt the buildings collapsing five blocks away. From their windows they watched what they described as a "snowstorm" fall across the canyon of buildings and streets between their apartment and ground zero. Before they could grasp what was happening, a thick blizzard of whitish gray debris cut their view of the outside world. Then the pelting started. To Diane it sounded like tons of gravel were being dumped on the roof of their century-old building. Through the skylight, they watched the dust turn the sunlight into blackness.

Unlike most downtown residents, the Van Dykes were never evacuated. They had electricity and water and so it seemed natural to hole up at home -- it was the safest place they knew. The dust settled inside immediately, but whether it came through drafty window seals, the rooftop ventilation duct, or off the clothing and hair of the ghost-like people they let in from the street, Diane never knew. "I wouldn't even describe it as dust. It's finer than talcum powder," she said. "It's the kind of stuff that gets in the fiber of your clothes. You can't just brush it off." But what she saw collecting inside her home faster than she could wipe it away was nothing compared to the litter of documents, suitcases, buildings, and body parts three-feet-deep outside. Even as she wiped the loft down, Diane felt fortunate.

It was on Sept. 13 that Christine Todd Whitman first announced that New York's air and water were safe. According to Nadler, Whitman's proclamation came before the EPA had received a single test result for sampling of indoor air or dust, but even so, her words provided the reassurance that Diane needed. The Van Dykes could have evacuated to a place with safe, clean air, but Diane continued to clean her apartment instead.

That same day, however, a small cut on her leg grew inexplicably swollen and infected. Both Diane and Bob, like thousands of downtown residents and workers, said they developed a persistent dry cough in the weeks that followed. Diane diligently followed common sense and the instructions the EPA slipped under her door: use a wet mop to dust regularly and vacuum with a specialized High Efficiency Particulate Air filter (HEPA) that traps and removes extremely small particles. She wrapped her air conditioner in blankets, sealed the filter from her heating vent in a plastic bag, and shut off all the ducts.

Meanwhile the fires at Ground Zero continued to burn. Street cleaners and Army trucks kicked up the smoke and ash throughout the Financial District. When Diane's cuts and scrapes didn't heal, when her nose bled from dry cracking in the membranes inside her nostrils, she began to suspect that despite the EPA's assurances, the dust she was continuously cleaning was affecting her health.

Eight weeks after the attacks, in the middle of the night, Diane lay in bed wide-awake. The right side of her neck, face, and head throbbed with incessant pain that had grown worse over the last two days. Once, she had an abscess in her tooth. This felt like an abscess in her eardrum.

Three days later the pain was unbearable. At New York University's Downtown Hospital Emergency Room, doctors diagnosed Diane with an ear infection. Two men she met in the waiting room described the same pain, but Diane's doctors told her there was no association with the dust and the downtown cleanup.

Antibiotics cleared her infection, but her frequent colds, respiratory infections, allergies, and low energy levels have lingered. Over the past year Diane said she has called in sick to her waitress job an average of three days each month. She hadn't missed three days in the entire year before Sept. 11. "I just haven't been feeling very good. My breathing is bad. Every time something goes around I get sick," she said. "I'm not the calm, focused person I used to be."

The Van Dykes looked to the EPA for answers, but like many residents now campaigning for government help, they have found little resolution. Indeed, for nine months after Sept. 11, the EPA insisted that the dust contained few contaminants and posed little health risk to anyone but those caught outdoors in the initial plume from the towers' collapse. The agency and the city Health Department referred to hundreds of their own tests, few of which have been made fully public. The agencies asserted that none of the hundred or so buildings they tested required abatement, but their results were criticized from the start as incomplete and nonspecific -- even from departments within the EPA.

Doubting the government's findings, the Ground Zero Elected Officials Task Force -- including Nadler, New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and City Council member Margarita Lopez -- conducted their own independent study and released results in October 2001. The task force looked at samples from two downtown apartments and found asbestos levels in the dust nearly 460 times the EPA's allowable limit. The task force study was the first in a series of independent efforts that slowly began to chip away at the EPA's findings.

In June 2002, nine months after the attacks, the EPA opened its help lines for the first time to residents wanting testing and cleaning in their apartments. "We were told that somebody would come by. We were told so many different things. I don't think I've gotten an honest answer from them," Diane said about her early conversations with EPA officials. "Then I heard one day on the news that they didn't think there was a problem, but just to make people feel better they were going to send people to clean. And it occurred to me, these people they were going to send, they weren't going to be scientists or anything."

Despite their skepticism, the Van Dykes immediately signed up. It was seven months before they received a call to schedule a cleanup.

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