Spring 2004 Edition

Fair Lawn's Victim of International Terrorism and ...      Bob Gulack, long-time Fair Lawn resident, was a victim of terrorists on September 11, 2001. Since October 2001, Gulack's health has rapidly deteriorated. For that, he blames not just Osama Bin Laden, but also the White House and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On September 11th at 8:30 AM, Gulack arrived at his 7 World Trade Center office. Gulack, a senior attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, turned on his computer and checked his e-mail. He remembers thinking, "It looks like today will be a typical day." A few minutes later, his office momentarily darkened. He then heard the sound of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center towers. Everyone in his office was evacuated to the office building lobby. Gulack said, "The security officers told us we were not allowed to leave because of the debris falling from the 110 story tower. We didn't know until later that bodies were also raining down from the building." "After the second plane hit, everyone left our building. We knew by then that New York City was under enemy attack. Since I noticed the wind was blowing south, I decided to walk uptown. I didn't know if the planes contained any kind of chemical or biological agents." Gulack said, " I wasn't exposed to the smoke or fire that day. I didn't have any coughing problems or asthma or any kind of respiratory problem". That was to come later. Gulack told Fair Lawn News, "After our offices were destroyed, SEC management decided to move us into the Woolworth Building, two blocks from Ground Zero. When we arrived at our new offices a month after the attacks, the fires were still burning intensely at Ground Zero. You could see yellow smoke in the air inside our offices. Almost immediately, about half of us fell ill. I did, too. " Before going to work in the Woolworth Building, Gulack had been in excellent health. "Since October 2001, I have had bronchitis more than half a dozen times. I was hospitalized in the late summer of 2002 for pneumonia. My CT scan now shows permanent, incurable lung damage - calcification, scarring, and lung collapse. Two days after coming to work in the Woolworth Building, I began to suffer from reactive airway disorder. For two years, I have had to take steroids and other medications twice a day to control this condition." Gulack is worried not just about his health, but that of thousands of other residents and workers in Lower Manhattan. He says, "My case is far from unusual. Yet the EPA continues to insist that no one was harmed by World Trade Center contamination unless they were directly exposed on September 11th to the dust from the towers' collapse or helped clean up Ground Zero afterwards." According to the EPA's own Inspector General, "EPA's early public statements following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers reassured the public regarding the safety of the air outside the Ground Zero area. However, when EPA made a September 18th announcement that the air was safe to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement."  Gulack says, "the Inspector General's report clearly showed that the White House pressured the EPA into changing cautioning statements into falsely reassuring ones. The Inspector General found that one motive of the White House was to re-open Lower Manhattan for business, particularly the New York Stock Exchange, as soon as possible." Gulack says, "For two years after the attack, the outside of the Woolworth Building where I work was never cleaned. The debris on the outside of the building was shown to be 3% asbestos, and people were working in the building with open windows!  After pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the landlord made some effort to clean the rooms in the building that are used to supply air to the offices, but my union proved those rooms were later recontaminated by the asbestos from the outside of the building. My union also proved that the elevators and stairwells in the Woolworth Building were also contaminated." He says "It is EPA's responsibility, under the law, to protect everyone from unnecessary exposure to 9/11 debris. They ought to have ensured that all buildings were professionally abated, inside and out. Instead, they provided only inadequate assistance for personal residences, and arbitrarily declared that office buildings were none of their concern. " "It is an outrage" Gulack says, "that EPA has been leaving landlords and employers to clean up as much or as little as they want to. It is a deliberate crime against the American people that, to this day, the EPA continues to insist they said nothing misleading and did all they should have done, dismissing the report of their own inspector general, and the scientific studies that now prove how many of us were sickened as a result of the EPA's misleading public statements." Gulack also says that the federal government is continuing to cover-up the air quality problems in Lower Manhattan. "The White House official (James Connaughton) who forced EPA to hide the truth is still in charge today. He has announced that the EPA will continue in their policy of refusing to test office buildings."  Gulack adds "In fact, Connaughton has been appointed by the President to review EPA's conduct after September 11th. That's like having asked Al Capone to investigate crime in Chicago." A World Trade Center Health Registry has been set up to monitor health care problems of Lower Manhattan residents. Gulack claims "The health registry is not designed to accurately and thoroughly track who has been harmed by air quality problems. The administrators of that program have so far refused to include medical information from workers and residents who didn't happen to be in New York on September 11, but who suffered from later exposure to the contamination. The Registry is a political cover-up that has nothing to do with real science. They don't want to assemble evidence that proves how many thousands of New Yorkers were rushed back into southern Manhattan by the EPA and then suffered long-term illness." Gulack says "the cover-up is continuing, even as more and more New Yorkers are continuing to be harmed. The lives of thousands of innocent children remain at risk. The doctors at the Mount Sinai World Trade Center clinic report they have treated thousands of people suffering from respiratory problems that would have been avoided had the White House not pressured the EPA into lying to the American people".  Bob Gulack with the respiratory mask he needed to wear in the Woolworth Building.     On February 13, 2004, the federal workers' compensation program accepted Bob Gulack's claim that he had suffered respiratory injuries while at work in the Woolworth Building.      Fair Lawn News Will Continue Our Coverage Of Bob Gulack's Story In Future Editions   For more information, see:  http://www.epa.gov/oigearth/reports/2003/WTC_report_20030821.pdf http://www.epa.gov/oigearth/reports/2003/wtc/toc.htm