The Freedom Tower

Alright, already. Beating a dead horse to death, in this case, is a good thing. So, listen up.
Nicole Gelinas of the City Journal, asks the question, will New York’s heroic post-9/11 legacy permanently fracture into ugly accusations?
“You would think that former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Todd Whitman was Osama bin Laden, judging from the nasty reaction she reportedly got at Monday’s Congressional hearing on the EPA’s response to 9/11. Whitman faced sharp criticism for her statement, a week after 9/11, that the air downtown—not directly on “the pile,” as the World Trade Center site was called—“was safe to breathe.” Interrogators implied that Whitman was incorrect, at best, and flat-out lying, at worst. An out-of-state representative even attacked Whitman for saying that 9/11 was personal for her, since her son was in 7 World Trade Center that morning.
Then there’s that small band of critics, including some 9/11 survivors, that haunts former mayor Rudolph Giuliani at his New York City campaign appearances, trying to shame him for various perceived 9/11-related infractions. Among other things, they charge that he failed to upgrade first responders’ radios with current technologies long before 9/11, and that he was negligent in not ensuring that recovery workers protected themselves with proper respiratory equipment on the pile and for opening Lower Manhattan to office workers too soon, when the air might not have been safe to breathe.
Was Whitman wrong to say the air downtown—again, not on the pile—was “safe”? Let’s remember that many of the EPA’s air quality tests in Lower Manhattan in the first month after 9/11 showed “slightly elevated” levels of asbestos in Battery Park City, and other tests found “detectable” levels, below what’s considered dangerous, in the Financial District. A few spots revealed higher levels. But the high-powered vacuuming the EPA was doing, both outside and inside, seemed to bring levels down below “concern” amounts.
But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that even “slightly elevated” asbestos levels anywhere in the area made it strictly correct, if one wanted to be 100 percent sure instead of relying on personal judgment in an unprecedented situation, to announce that it wasn’t possible to describe the air downtown as “safe.” Many questions would have followed: when could we have known if the air was safe enough for financial-industry workers and Battery Park City residents to return downtown? Would it have been safe in a month? What about New Year’s? How about by May 2002, when recovery workers finished major operations? What about today? Should the EPA have taken steps to declare Ground Zero a SuperFund site?”