The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should have done more to ensure that World Trade Center rescue workers wore respirators that would have protected them from the concrete, glass, asbestos and other pollutants that clogged the air after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Democrats charged Wednesday.

At a House Education and Labor Committee hearing that focused on health protections for 9/11 rescue and recovery workers, Democrats said OSHA should have enforced regulations requiring workers to wear respirators in such hazardous conditions. “At the Pentagon, OSHA enforced regulations requiring the use of respirators, and no workers became sick,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., “At Ground Zero, Con Edison made sure that its workers wore respirators, and none of them became sick. But OSHA failed to enforce its own regulations at the World Trade Center site, and now 70 percent of the first responders are sick and others have died.”

Patricia Clark, OSHA regional administrator for New York, said during the 10-month recovery period, OSHA distributed more than 131,000 respirators and urged workers to wear them. “The message was loud and clear that any worker in that area was required to wear protection,” Clark said. “It was posted everywhere.” Clark also testified that she and her staff decided that issuing citations against workers who did not comply because it “was not a viable alternative in New York City at that time” and could have caused legal complications that would have hampered OSHA’s ability to monitor cleanup efforts. “If any of us thought it would have worked we would have done it ... I assure you,” she said. Other federal and state agencies were also involved in monitoring the site, she said. “It’s usually a unified command with something of this magnitude,” Clark said.

Clark also testified that workers would have had to have been exposed to chemical above levels permitted by OSHA before citations could be issued. “OSHA’s breathing zone samples revealed exposures well below the agency’s permissible exposure limits for the majority of chemicals and substances tested,” Clark said. But another witness before the panel, Philip L. Landrigan, a physician who has treated many Ground Zero workers, said from a medical point of view, there is no safe level of exposure for a substance such as asbestos, which was present at the World Trade Center site. Clark said that at Ground Zero OSHA collected more than 1,400 air samples to test for the presence of asbestos, and all were well below the agency’s permissible exposure limits.

Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., said while he understood Clark believed she did not have the authority to take enforcement actions against workers not wearing the proper equipment, doing so might have averted some of the injuries the rescue received and are still suffering from. “At some point, somebody has to stand up and make that decision,” Miller said.

Other Democrats on the panel said workers also were confused by an assessment from former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman that New York air was safe to breathe, a statement that made first responders believe it was okay to not wear a respirator. “The federal government failed them. It told them it was safe and it wasn’t,” Nadler said.

Another witness at the hearing, Freddy Cordero, was a member of the “bucket brigade” that worked to clear rubble and debris from the World Trade Center in the days after the attack. Cordero said he worked there on Sept. 13, 2001, then on Sept. 14 was assigned to clean up three public schools near the site that were shelters for men and women doing the rescue and recovery work. Cordero said he owned a respirator, which he used in his job, but forgot to take it the first day at the World Trade Center and could not get back to the school where he worked to retrieve it. While working at the World Trade Center area, Cordero said the only masks provided were paper masks and a few days later workers were given half-face masks with cartridges. He was later diagnosed with lung disease and said he can now only work part-time due to ill health.

Landrigan, who oversees a medical program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York that provides medical care to workers injured in the World Trade Center cleanup, said more than 21,000 of those emergency workers have sought treatment for respiratory ailments, gastrointestinal disorders and mental health problems. More medical difficulties could be ahead, he said, as chemicals the workers inhaled continue to interact with their bodies. “The long-term consequences of these unique exposures are not yet known,” he told the panel. “Respiratory illness, psychological distress and financial devastation have become a new way of life for many.”