With a recent report showing that almost 70 percent of World Trade Center first responders are having lung problems, there's new concern for people who lived in the area. As this ScienCentral News video explains, scientists hope that a new computer model can help determine who's been most affected by the smoke and ash.
World Trade Center Fallout
Esther Regelson, 47, has lived in her Lower Manhattan apartment for nearly half her life. She was two blocks away from the World Trade Center when the South Tower collapsed, shaking her entire building and forcing dust and debris into the air. "You can't breathe. I mean, you're gasping. You're gasping for air, and you're getting dust ... It was gritty. We were covered with dust, head to toe," she says.
She blames the ash and smoke for her acid reflux and aggravated asthma, which she says is consistent with the health issues of some of her neighbors. Health officials still don't know the full impact to communities surrounding the World Trade Center. The air pollution from Ground Zero contained fine particles of debris including glass and metal, as well as toxic gases.
Now, researchers have developed a computer simulation of the plume of smoke and airborne dust from the collapse and continued burning of the World Trade Center. Rutgers University scientist Georgiy Stenchikov worked with Lioy and others to use a program that's typically used to simulate the spread of pollution.
"The model reconstructs some pieces of the picture for places where we don't have observations," Stenchikov says. He says that they used the most up-to-date modeling approach, using data about the region's winds, temperatures, and humidity to supplement surface and space-based observations. Stenchikov's team was able to reconstruct the precise location and concentration of the plume for up to a month after September 11.
"Mostly affected were the people who were in the vicinity of the World Trade Center," Stanchikov says. "But still it is very important to know how this concentration was distributed." While the computer model produces an impressive animation of the plume, Lioy says that the model also produces valuable data to pinpoint how people might have been affected individually. "We can actually come up with an index for each day, to say whether you were highly exposed or a non-exposed individual," he says.
As they wrote in the journal Environmental Fluid Mechanics, the results of their model matched the results from air monitors that were functioning around New York City. Their model shows that communities southeast of the World Trade Center had higher levels of exposure. The plume also reached the borough of Brooklyn, but the levels of airborne contaminants were ten times less. Stenchikov and Lioy say that future research is needed to determine the health effects on populations at these different levels of exposure.
The researchers say that this data is key to fully assessing the impact to people's health. "The good news is that there wasn't an overwhelming impact of disease in everyone in southern Manhattan," Lioy says. "But there were some individuals that were affected. It's a situation where your proximity to the plume, the time you spent in the plume, the intensity of the plume at the time really led to the most significant exposure."
Stenchikov says that this computer model can also be used in homeland security planning. "It is also important to develop [this] technology to do the same work, in case something similar could happen in future." If future threats include poisonous or radiological agents being released into the air, Stenchikov says that this model could also help in coordinating a response. Lioy says, "In a plume situation, whether I exit an area or stay in place and stay in a room could be a matter of saving your life."
Stenchikov hopes the model will be used to fill in what happened that day, giving health officials the information they need to better understand health problems from 9/11.
Stenchikov's research was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, which declined to comment on the research due to pending lawsuits filed in the wake of the collapse. His research was published in the July 2006 issue of Environmental Fluid Mechanics.
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