Ex-EPA head apologizes for saying post-9/11 air was safe
In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) incorrectly assured New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe. To this day, first responders are still being diagnosed with and dying from illnesses born of breathing in the toxic air at Ground Zero.
Now Christine Todd Whitman, who was administrator of the EPA from January 2001 until June 2003, has admitted that she was wrong about the air quality in an interview with the Guardian to be published Sunday.
“Whatever we got wrong, we should acknowledge and people should be helped,” she told the British paper.
“I’m very sorry that people are sick,” she continued. “I’m very sorry that people are dying, and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry. We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”
Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, said she still “feels awful” about the tragedy. She said that she did not lie to the American people about the risk of breathing in the air and did not know how dangerous it was at the time.
“Every time it comes around to the anniversary, I cringe, because I know people will bring up my name, they blame me, they say that I lied and that people died because I lied. [They say] people have died because I made a mistake.”
Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the nation’s history: 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four U.S. airliners — flying two into the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York and one into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed in a field outside Shanksville, Pa.
Within a week of the tragedy, Whitman released a statement that read, “I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.”
Whitman has said that as head of the EPA she was simply passing along the information that government scientists gave at the time.
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