When Breathing Is Believing:
"The report, in fact, does not conclude that the E.P.A. was wrong in saying, one week after the attack, that the air in Lower Manhattan was 'safe to breathe,' but only that the scientific underpinning was inadequate, at that moment, for such a broad generalization. Nonetheless, former and current E.P.A. officials and independent scientists now say the declaration was a failure that could have lasting consequences in the next crisis, when health and safety information might save or cost lives."

From the first days after Sept. 11, 2001, the fears and unknowns about health and air quality in Lower Manhattan were compounded by the politics that swirl, as always, around the Environmental Protection Agency.

An arm of the federal government that is second-guessed and distrusted as perhaps no other had been put in charge of the environmental response. What was in the air and what people in Washington and New York believed about the E.P.A. were immediately intertwined.

That volatile mixture resurfaced this fall when the E.P.A. inspector general's office released its report on the agency's handling of the crisis. The report described an agency that struggled mightily to meet a challenge it had never been intended to face, using tools and standards that were sometimes inadequate to the task.

But the inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, also directly addressed what has become an even more grave crisis for the agency — gnawing public cynicism and doubt about its performance after the attack. She concluded that administrators, at a crucial moment on Sept. 18, 2001, went beyond what they knew about the effects of the World Trade Center towers' collapse.

On the basis of tests for asbestos, which had been mostly reassuring, they made a blanket pronouncement that the air was safe to breathe. And the White House, the report said, at least indirectly influenced the wording of some of that statement and others by removing cautionary language from agency news releases. Later, broader tests for things like PCB's and dioxins largely validated the statement of air safety, the report said. But for the E.P.A. and its relationship with New Yorkers, many of whom had mistrusted the first reassurances, it was too late. A corrosion of trust had begun.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/nyregion/30AIR.html?pagewanted=all&position=