Articles and Comment
19th August
2007
Deutsche Bank Building Catches Fire
New York's infrastructure seems to be disintegrating.
Following the steam pipe blast of the 19th July, it was reported on the 13th August that two pedestrians fell into a hole that had opened up in the pavement (sidewalk). Now, the empty Deutsche Bank building next to the WTC has caught fire, burning for seven hours.
"We heard this crackling," said Elizabeth Hughes, who saw the fire start from her rooftop deck across from the tower. "And then a huge fire that went up three floors fast. It was massive..."
17th August
2007
'I believe my cancer is related to exposure to WTC dust and smoke.' - Etta
Sanders
Prisonplanet published an article by Etta Sanders, written shortly before her death. Ms Sanders lived near the WTC and had lived in lower Manhattan for nearly 30 years. In 2005, she was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.
"I believe I am the victim of the lies of my government. I live a short distance from the World Trade Center site. Ten days after the Sept. 11 attacks, my husband, our twin boys who had turned 3-years-old on Sept. 8, and I moved back into our home.
For months, like so many of our neighbors, we worried about the air, kept our windows closed, ran air filters day and night, took the children out of the neighborhood to play outdoors and tried to believe what we were told—that the air was safe.
Two years ago I was diagnosed with stage IV, metastatic lung cancer. Inoperable. Incurable....
I dearly hope that I am in a small minority of people who were so gravely harmed by the aftermath of the WTC attacks, but I fear otherwise. Whether the numbers are large or small, the U.S. government is culpable for that harm and there must be compensation for all victims and their families."
19th July
2007
The Reactor Cores Make their Presence Felt?
On the 18th July, an underground blast blew a 7m wide crater in the middle of Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Station. The blast was said to be caused by the rupture of an underground steam pipe, installed in 1924. This report in the Daily Mail said that an initial burst of steam rose higher than the nearby 77 storey Chrysler Building. It goes on to say:
"There were also concerns about what was spewed into the air. Some of the pipes carrying steam through the city are wrapped in asbestos. "The big fear that we have is there may or may not have been asbestos release," Bloomberg said."
The Daily Mail article then included this very interesting photograph, of workers supposedly "protected against asbestos" examining the crater.
The men are wearing full Nuclear Biological Chemical (NBC) protection suits. Is this required to deal with asbestos? From at most 30-40 feet of 2 foot diameter pipe? Hardly a vast environmental hazard.
It could be argued that the explosion was treated as suspicious as a matter of routine - are all such events now considered to be possible NBC attacks? The report went on to say:
Officials won't know the test results until later, the mayor said, but if there was a release it may have washed away with the water that came with the steam.
This is not credible. The asbestos thermal insulation would have been dispersed into the air and all over the street with the 77 storey high steam blast. And of course they have instant test kits - in the case of an NBC attack, it would not be much use having to wait hours to know or not. Not unless you want everyone to be infected with the Andromeda Strain.
The incandescent reactor cores buried beneath Manhattan will remain "hot" for centuries, continuing to emit radioactive products including gases and heat. This heat and buildup of gas pressure has nowhere to go but permeate through the underground facility that was under Manhattan and then - up.
Did anyone manage to get a Geiger Counter or a Gas Sampler anywhere near this crater?
25th May 2007
The Whistle Starts to Blow.
At last, the truth starts to be told. Mr Wasserman is the first journalist to have the courage to all but spell out the truth about that awful day.
http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman05222007.html
Drop
Dead, New Yorkers
Bush, Giuliani, Whitman and the Lethal Fallout from 9/11
HARVEY WASSERMAN
Counterpunch
Wednesday May 23, 2007
The fallout now taints us all.
Amidst the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush and Giuliani saddled up their bullhorns and raced down to the smoldering World Trade Center to shout out a single "patriotic" demand: re-open the stock market!
And to hell with the health of the good citizens doing the clean-up. Ditto the rest of us down wind.
The public health outcome has now become visible: those brave and caring people who marched onto the site to do what needed to be done are starting to die in droves.
The New York Times says less than a third of them were wearing respirators. Giuliani is getting a long overdue bashing for letting this happen. With all his swagger, Rudy imposed a single demand above all: the financial district must re-open. That people would die doing it was known but never mentioned. Giuliani had his priorities.
Bush's Environmental Protection Agency knew full well that the airborne fallout from the smoldering the World Trade Center was absolutely lethal.
Then headed by the "green" nuclear power advocate Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA knew the cancerous clouds pouring out of the site were a toxic brew of lethal chemicals, the likes of which the world had not seen since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl...
Indeed not. The world had not seen the likes such a toxic brew since Chernobyl. But then it did - two Chernobyls in the middle of New York.
18th May 2007
On
May 18th, the ex-head of the EPA, Ms Christine Whitman, reversed her earlier
refusal and agreed to testify before a Congressional Panel chaired by Rep.
Jerrold Nadler investigating the response to 9/11.
Ms Whitman is the subject of 2 lawsuits brought by residents of New York and government employees for the health problems they are now experiencing.
From the press report on ABC News and Rawstory:
"Multiple studies have documented health problems amongst 9/11 emergency responders and workers. One study released last year by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York showed more than 70 percent of Ground Zero workers suffered health ailments or severe respiratory problems.
"In an e-mailed statement, Nadler expressed gratitude for Whitman's decision. "There are so many unanswered questions about why certain decisions were made," said the lawmaker, whose district includes lower Manhattan."
They will be suffering "health ailments". People are still dying today from the effects of Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Bikini, the Atmospheric Bomb Tests etc.
26th January
2007
The Downloadable extract from the report has
been updated, with extra pages now added.
8th January
2007
Reports are now making the news of a (colourless?) gas cloud carrying a strange
odour, covering Manhattan from the tip of the island to Central Park, across
the Hudson to New Jersey. The power company say there is no leak of natural
gas from the gas supply.
Could this be connected to the reactor cores that have been buried under the WTC after the meltdown and the extensive underground facility that must exist or have existed under New York that these reactors were powering?
Major products of nuclear fission include radioactive isotopes of the Noble Gases - Krypton , Xenon, Radon, Helium. The capture - or rather non-capture - of Kr 85 in the nuclear industry to prevent its release into the environment from reprocessing plants is a major and serious issue. As I show in the report, the favoured "fission pathways" of Uranium produce radioactive Noble Gases.
With the cores still buried down there, entombed like their Chernobyl siblings, intense radioative decay will be ongoing. As time goes on, the pressure of the Noble Gases produced will be building up and filling the underground spaces.
Could the pressure of those gases now be forcing their way to the surface, like Radon in areas of granite topography?
Recently, building work has started at the WTC site on the "Freedom Tower". Has this disturbed the area and allowed gas to escape?
Radon detection techniques could be used to analyse this gas cloud and identify its nature.
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