I remember the Environmental Protection Agency (perhaps it was the local NYC one, can’t recall) telling the public that there was no air quality problem afterward. So THAT is why I was coughing up solid chunks of yellow mucus for an entire year after 9/11. And I lived about 15 miles away from the site, in Brooklyn at the time. This coughing up mucus only stopped when they finally razed every bit of the destroyed towers-—like a switch turned off. That was one of my first experiences of the government lying through its filthy teeth. The schools in lower Manhattan had to put their students elsewhere until the schools could be cleaned up. There was an inches thick coating of dust all over the city.