Joel Kupferman wheels his office chair about the tiny space left between the three desks and thousands of loose-leaf pages piled in his 8-by-8 foot office at the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, just across the street from the regional EPA headquarters on Broadway. It's a shoestring firm that built a reputation representing voiceless underdogs in heated anti-government battles.

In November 2001, skeptical residents of the Tribeca Tower called Kupferman's office for help. The New York City Department of Health had tested for asbestos throughout the 52-story building and found nothing. Kupferman hired an independent contractor to re-test in the building using a highly sensitive electron microscope method. A certified industrial hygienist took samples throughout the building, finding an alarming 550,000 structures of asbestos per square centimeter -- 550 times the safe limit of the microscopic fibers -- in a hallway ventilation duct that circulates fresh air throughout the building. Kupferman repeated his investigation in five other buildings, finding dangerous amounts of asbestos in each one, and he began to see a pattern.

Tests conducted by governmental agencies using weaker microscopes were not detecting the unusually fine and fractured asbestos particles that resulted from the phenomenal force of two 110-story skyscrapers collapsing. Tests from inside EPA's own offices drive the point home: Their samples showed a 40 percent increase in asbestos detection using electron microscopes. "They didn't really want to find the stuff," Kupferman said, "and so they succeeded in not finding stuff again and again."

EPA spokesperson Mary Mears bristled at that accusation. "There are certain differences of opinion that will not be resolved," she said, explaining that she could not comment on the private residential lab results because they may not have been collected using precise EPA methods. "We do not agree that this is a public health concern," she said. "We have not seen the evidence, we do not see the danger. And personally, I think it's a shame to think the peoples' civil servants [EPA employees] would lie to them."

When another of Kupferman's tests at a Franklin Street apartment yielded the highest levels of asbestos found in a Manhattan residence, EPA and city Department of Environmental Protection investigators agreed to come and take a look. According to Kupferman, the two agencies split the same samples, tested according to their respective methods, and returned telling results. Using the cheaper and simpler microscope method, the DEP failed to find any asbestos. Using an electron microscope, EPA testers returned a reading five times the agency's safety threshold.

"A week-and-a-half later the EPA announces that they are going to do the whole indoor cleanup of residences downtown. I think this was the catalyst," Kupferman said. "We put the facts on the table."

On June 8, 2002, despite its earlier insistence that cleaning indoor spaces was beyond the EPA's jurisdiction, the agency launched what it described as a comprehensive residential testing and cleaning program. The plan failed to address commercial buildings, leaving that issue, without explanation, to private property owners. It did, however, take a giant step toward placating Bob and Diane Van Dyke and other residents angered about air quality issues.

But while Callahan and the EPA see the cleanup as a successful program that answers earlier criticism of the agency's 9/11 response, critics on the New York City Council and elsewhere poked holes in its premise. The program was voluntary, they complained. Only residences that looked contaminated to the naked eye qualified for cleaning, and the cleanup addressed only asbestos and ignored the dozens of other microscopic contaminants in the dust. At the end of the day, the critics said, the cleanup was flawed because it did not require that a building be shut down and cleaned all at once. Crews might clean one floor, then, but the toxic dust could still find its way back to that floor on residents' shoes, or in the ventilation system, or just drifting on the air.

"The issue of not cleaning common spaces -- hallways, lobbies, foyers -- and then allowing people to drag into their now-cleaned apartment what was outside and not cleaned makes no sense," said Dr. Steven Levin, head of Mt. Sinai's World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program treating workers exposed to the toxic dust. "To not consider that question makes it clear that this was just an approach to appease, and not to solve a genuine problem. I think that's unfortunate."

The critics say all the unsound aspects add up to a program that was never intended to be effective in the first place, an assertion the EPA and its spokeswoman, Mary Mears, deny. "While we felt there wasn't a big risk in the long term, we felt a need to offer something to those residents. We do not feel this is a public-health emergency," she said. "But it goes well beyond anything that could be called a P.R. campaign."

When the Van Dykes' apartment was finally cleaned on Feb. 5 this year, seven workers spent four hours on the 2,200 square foot space. None of them wore the waist-level air monitors Mears insisted all crews would have as a safety precaution. No one wore facemasks, respirators, or even plastic gloves, even though the site supervisor had determined that all of the Van Dykes' upholstered furniture, mattresses and bedding were contaminated and should be thrown out. Hot water was used to remove dust from ventilation grates; Murphy's Oil was spread on the floors. The carpets, which remained, were not vacuumed using the wet methods prescribed on the EPA's Web site. Neither were the drapes. HEPA vacuums were used, but when a hose abruptly popped off the machine and dust spewed onto the freshly vacuumed floor, the hose was simply reattached and the floor was not re-vacuumed. The cleaning process appeared no different from a standard housecleaning.

"I don't understand that," said Levin, of Mt. Sinai. "If you think that there is a significant hazard that you ought to be using a HEPA filter and vacuum, why not place an adequate filter in front of the mouth and nose? They never told people they should wear respiratory protection."

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