|
http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefscience6orkin.htm Aftermaths of the 9/11 Disaster An Interview with Firefighter/Author Dennis Smith by Jenna Orkin [This is an interview with Dennis
Smith, author of Report From Ground Zero, regarding aftermaths of the
9/11 terrorist attack. It was conducted by Jenna Orkin of the World Trade
Center Environmental Organization.]
Like any discussion of the horrors of that day and
its aftermath, the following interview with ex-firefighter and author Dennis
Smith may cause pain but Smith was generous nonetheless. The interview took place December 9, 2003 in
Smith's apartment on the We had already spoken on the phone about Smith's
take on the health issues of firefighters at Ground Zero, which I wanted to
know about for a memoir I was writing on the environmental disaster of 9/11.
But it turned out that Smith had intended some of his remarks to be off the
record so he suggested a second interview in person. He was a trim man, small by firefighter standards.
The apartment was furnished in the muted tones of the 18th century, the
shelves stocked with art books. Voltaire's desk rested against the wall. I
knew it was Voltaire's desk because I'd asked; Smith had mentioned it in his
book on the recovery effort, Report
from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center. "It's from his house in "What does it feel like to write at it?" "I just do handwritten correspondence there,
Ma'am. My computer is upstairs." The polite firefighter in response to a woman's
silly question. We'll get past my golly-gee gawking; I had to ask. "I was concerned about what you wrote. I
hadn't intended all that to be published." I can imagine that concern: "Aagh!" It's a reaction one frequently encounters
when it dawns on people you're writing a book; anything they say may be used
against them. Considering which, Smith has been the consummate gentleman.
Anyway, I don't want enemies, certainly not among the good guys. "Sometimes I think I should wear a sandwich
board that says, 'Warning: Memoirist at Work,'" I reply. "What
would you like to say about being at Ground Zero?" "We knew the place was unhealthy. What we
don't know is how those carcinogens work together. Asbestos has a 5-20 year
incubation period." "Even forty." "Forty. But we don't know if some of these
contaminants can have an effect in two years." In our previous conversation, Smith has mentioned
several cancers among Ground Zero workers which some medical professionals
believe may be attributable to exposure to 9/11 contaminants. "I've
heard people say that there will be a time bomb effect," he says now. "You wrote that firefighters had trouble with
their eyes. What was the diagnosis?" "People's eyes got filled with microscopic
pieces of dust. Many firefighters' eyes were caked shut. My eyes were caked.
Others were so bad they had to go to the hospital to have their eyes opened.
I used a spray bottle of a clear medicinal water.
[The next sentence, which is indecipherable in my handwritten notes, mentions
saline solution.] But that's nothing new for firefighters." "Yeah. You talk in the book about how
firefighters crawl through smoke, coughing til
they're nearly unconscious, as part of their training. It's called, 'taking a
beating' and it would violate OSHA regulations." "OSHA didn't exist at the time we were doing
that. But the conditions for firefighters are definitely unhealthy. In "Even if they smoke?" "I think so. Do you smoke?" "No." "Does your son smoke?" "No. My father smoked." "Is he alive?" "No. He died of a brain tumor at
fifty-seven." "That's not from smoking." "The primary tumor may have been somewhere
else." "And metastasized, you mean." "Yes." "My children smoke. I'm always after them. But
there's a myth that the lungs repair themselves in five years. 'At Ground Zero there was a group of doctors who'd
created a cleansing system that consists of repeated saunas, exercises and
vitamins. It was developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Of course some doctors say any
firefighter would feel better after doing four saunas a day." "Did insurance pay for this?" "No. The 'These people had a big heart. But they were also
trying to prove something. Toxic metals tend to stay in the body. They don't
digest out of the body. The [doctors doing the treatment] showed me towels of
different color sweat - purple, yellow, red... Detoxification exists only in
sweat according to them. The treatment took thirty days." "Did you do it?" "No." "Why not? It sounds like a vacation." "It seemed like work to me. It took three
hours. You had to go on the treadmill... X and those doctors don't think much
of the treatment. But these firefighters were desperate for some sort of
relief. They couldn't walk upstairs." "Did they go back to work?" "On night duty or sick leave." "You talked in your book about Mafia
involvement in the fireproofing of the "The other stuff. The 'The beams were not adequately cleaned before the
fireproofing was applied. It was put on top of rust. When it was tested in
'93 after the first explosion, they hit it with a hammer and it fell off.
They tried to reapply it but they couldn't get to the underbeam. 'The litigation lasted from the day the WTC opened
just about til '92 when Dibono
was found in the basement of the In his book Smith says that Louis Dibono, head of the company that applied the
fireproofing, was part of the John Gotti family. He
died from multiple gunshot wounds. "That litigation was created by the Port
Authority against this construction company," Smith continues.
"There wasn't any settlement. The company went kaput." "Would it have been possible to fireproof the
building?" "No. Local law requires a rating system. Steel
can burn for two hours before it melts. The I imagine this is because the buildings are taller
or there are more of them. "Did you read the paperback edition of my
book?" "Yes." "The last seven pages which were added later
have that information. The National Institute of Standards and Technology
were given a thirty million dollar grant. It was laughable to me because they
came to the same conclusion I came to in my book. They found that the floors
collapsed in the heat. The government has its heart in the right place but
[studies] have to do with keeping people employed. I'd rather take that
thirty million and put it in public schools. Even if you got ten kids to get
A's instead of B's it would be worth it." "How has 9/11 changed your politics?" "If anything it's made me more conservative
because I recognize we have to rely on our own diligence to protect
ourselves. This is true on the left as well as the right. It's laxity of
government that's created chaos and almost all the ability of radical Islamists
to wreak havoc. Bernard Lewis said we should have invaded "But the terrorists didn't come from "That's true. But if there's any good to come
out of this invasion it's that it'll force those governments to reevaluate
themselves. They've left most of their populations behind." "That would take a long time, for them to
change their thinking to such an extent." "Fifty years... Did you see Hillary Clinton's
fusillades yesterday? She said the Bush administration didn't have to
embroider information. There was enough. If that's true, why didn't we go
into "We should talk about masks. What kind of
respirators do firefighters usually wear?" "It's not a respirator which is forced air[?] This is a self-contained air tank." "How long does it last?" "The new ones, about forty-five minutes. The
mask whistles when it's running low. You have to go out and replace it." "Why didn't the firefighters wear masks at
Ground Zero?" "No one thought of the danger of ingestion. If
you can breathe they thought it was O.K. It's a shame. I think there's room
for litigation among the first responders. [Since this interview, several
lawsuits have been filed.] 'Everyone assumed the environment was dangerous in
terms of smoke and dust." This apparent contradiction of his previous
statement is probably resolvable by distinguishing between long-term versus
immediate dangers. But this is not a trial and I let the contradiction pass. "Even the bosses didn't wear masks. It was
only in the second week the firefighters were asked to wear masks. You know,
the mask weighs thirty pounds. 'Those first six weeks before the cranes did most
of the work were intensive. To have masks was impractical. I used a filter
mask when I took a body out after decomposition but generally not. Many
firefighters purposefully didn't wear masks because they wanted to smell
bodies." "Some people say that because Christy Todd
Whitman said the air was safe, rescue workers didn't feel it necessary to
wear masks." (I am one of twelve original plaintiffs in a potential
class action lawsuit against Whitman and the EPA.) "I don't think people felt that. Ground Zero
was led by smart people, experienced in emergency services, or the police.
They knew there's room for litigation against the city. 'In any emergency you act beyond the norm to try to
mitigate. Any act of heroism is against the norm. In my book I talk about the
firefighters who knew they might not come out. Terry Hutton saying, "I
want you to know I love you.' Other officers said, 'We might not survive
this.' All that is evidence they knew the buildings could come down. There
were six examples." "But firefighters go into burning buildings
every day." "You don't think when you go into a burning
building that you won't survive. You have confidence in the people you work
with that you're protected against flashover fires and holes. There are
always indications a building is going to collapse. The chief is trained to
look for cracks in the wall, separations in the bricks." "So what would the litigation against the city
be for?" "For not insisting that everyone wear
masks." "They did insist at the Pentagon." "Christy Todd Whitman explained - I don't
remember if it was to my satisfaction or not - that she didn't mean the air
was clear." "If the city had said, 'You've got to wear
your mask,' would the firefighters have done it?" "I think so. Of course you'd have to have
enough tanks and the facility to refill them." "Lieutenant Manny Gomez testified he brought a
mask. But he was told not to wear it for fear of panicking people." (He
also testified at a hearing held by the EPA Ombudsman that there were many
masks available but they went unused.) "It doesn't surprise me. [On the other hand] I
saw a chief begging men to wear masks. But the grief
was extraordinary and the motivation. So it was hard to boss people around.
The chief said, 'Put the mask on. The OSHA guys are here.' Some people did
it." "How does this make you feel about
Giuliani?" In his book Smith praises the Mayor. "He didn't have much to do with that. He
understood that the person who controlled the information was central to the
memory. This was the first major attack on 'No one had the authority to say anything, not EPA,
not DEP. Giuliani had to say everything in a way even the Governor
couldn't." "Did you think, based on what you saw, that
people should be allowed to move back in?" "Then I did." He emphasized the word
'then' to imply he no longer thought so. "When you hit a piece of
furniture," he hit the arm of the couch as resident/activist Catherine McVay Hughes had hit the table to make the same point in
her interview, "thousands of dust particles get released into the air.
You don't see them. But down there you could SEE the residue. It would cloud
up like powder." "How did it happen that they never found a
doorknob - everything was atomized - but they found body parts?" "They only found parts of 1250 people. So
there was a huge number of people for whom no DNA
was found. People who weren't atomized were protected by firefighters, by
their equipment. 'It's a very peculiar thing, how many naked bodies
were found." "What do you make of it? The clothes were
burned off?" "Or torn. When those buildings fell they
imploded like a huge mixer. A body didn't have a chance to stay contained.
The buidlings fell at 600 mph. It took twelve
seconds. But 292 bodies were found whole." "What was being there like? I know you wrote
about some of that in your book." "I suppose what I didn't say are those things
I felt shouldn't be said. 'The way the community of 9/11 worked, if
firefighters from 'I remember one day seeing a bunch of policewomen,
I guess they came down from some detail. Often people at the site weren't
working in full protective gear but in shirtsleeves and hard helmets. They
found a police officer's body. The way things worked in the services, they
found a badge or a gun, they'd leave it to that service and give it a
military aspect. These people chose to go into these buildings. They were taken
with the same stature as they had when they went in. I wondered what was
going through their minds as they carried the body. It's rare to see eight
policewomen together." "Why did the fires burn for so long?" "You know how many long burning fires there
are in this country? There are fires that have been burning for years. Tires
are buried in a pit and it would cost 43 million dollars to get to them to
put out the fire." "Could the WTC fires have been put out sooner,
say, by injecting nitrogen?" "No. The Fire Department was aware of the ways
to fight deepseated fires, how to dynamite the
walls down. But they took them down piece by piece because it was safer to do
it that way. They were also concerned with the integrity of the slurry
wall." "And the need to search for body parts." "Yes. That was almost holy in the beginning,
the care and prudence given to the lifting of every beam After that we needed
the steel in order to find out why the towers went down, to be prepared the
next time. There were grapplers that could lift the steel chinks. Then they
also had a system of spotters with long-range telescopes and binoculars.
Others sat in the trucks. It's not foolproof. But to understand empirically
why the towers went down, the Fire Department knew you'd have to have the
steel. When the "And there are a lot more skyscrapers than
spaceships. Some of that steel wound up in Third World countries: " 'Every beam was numbered and coded." "You could see that?" "Oh yeah. When steel melts, it bends and
weakens. It doesn't disintegrate like molten steel. It loses its ability to
hold." "So you weren't astonished when the buildings
collapsed?" "No. Anyone who's ever been in the WTC knows
how big it is. You see ten floors on fire, that's ten acres." Some
experts have raised questions about the speed at which the towers fell and
other evidence which they say suggests that a controlled demolition was also
involved. "How are you going to fight a fire like that? Last time I was
in the WTC, the June before, I was at an art exhibit and we had lunch on the
roof: Windows on the World." "Have you fought wild fires like the ones out
West?" "Sure. We've had huge brush fires in 'Those fires, the volume of fire, it's three feet
high for two blocks then suddently it's ten feet
high for two blocks. 'When you study to become a firefighter do they
tell you that at such and such a temperature, dioxin forms and at another
temperature some other contaminant forms?" "You take a course in it. You learn more about
the ability of fire to reproduce itself. There's a
phenomenon of air currents in a fire. You take thirty candles and put them
one foot away from each other, they'll stay separate. Four inches away, they
integrate at the top and grow to twice their size.' 'Years ago I went to the
Mutual Company factory, to their fire investigation lab to get fire ratings.
They burn everything there. If you burn a strip of polyurethane holding it
horizontally it burns slowly. The carcinogens it emits are extraordinary.
They'd kill you in two minutes. 'But if you place the polyurethane vertically, say,
a ten foot strip, the fire rises to the top in thirty seconds. That's what
happened in that nightclub last year. The polyurethane was used as
soundproofing. Polyurethane flat burns with the physical rules of radiated
heat, say, from left to right. Vertically, bottom to top it burns like
gasoline because heat rises. The natural instinct of heat is like water
seeking its own level. As it rises it doubles its volume every sixty seconds.
In polyurethane it's twice as fast." Jenna Orkin has written articles
for Counterpunch and other websites on the environmental disaster of 9/11 as
well as other subjects. She is an activist, currently as Spokesperson for the
World Trade Center Environmental Organization. Because
The Radical Academy publishes essays and articles on its website does not
imply acceptance or approval of the comments or opinions expressed by the
author of the material. Nor is the Academy responsible for any misrepresentation
of the facts included. It is your job to be a critical reader. |
|
|
