You mean like this?
Posted on 01/08/2006 11:12:51 AM PST by saquin
A young police detective who spent nearly 500 hours sifting through rubble at Ground Zero has died of a lung disease connected to his cleanup efforts, police union officials said yesterday.
James Zadroga, 34, who died Thursday at his parents' New Jersey home, retired from the NYPD in July 2004 because of his deteriorating health. He is the first emergency worker to die from constant exposure to the Sept. 11 wreckage at the World Trade Center, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association.
A high-ranking police source said the department does not have the medical authority to link Zadroga's death to his work at Ground Zero.
An autopsy was being done by the Ocean County, N.J., medical examiner's office.
Zadroga was inside Building 7 at the World Trade Center when it began to collapse on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. After narrowly escaping death, he spent nearly 500 hours over the next month and a half at the site, searching for victims amid tons of debris and dirt, Palladino said.
According to Palladino, many detectives even stayed at the site beyond their daily tours of duty, working on their own time.
Zadroga became ill about a month after returning to the Manhattan South Precinct in late 2001. He died at his parents' home in Little Egg Harbor, N.J., of black lung disease and mercury on the brain, Palladino said.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
>>>>I said it was " the most horrendous cloud of smoke and debris".
Yeah, I guess I did just reiterate that. Somehow both variations still didn't seem to describe it.
I believe that it's something that you had to live through in order to have the true grasp. I will never forget it, and I am so far removed. I am sorry you had to go through that.
We all went through it. I, in no way, am exclusive.
We can lay the blame of Mr. Zadroga's death on the Religion of Peace.
I'll agree with you on that. I wondered when they came out with the results too. My experience with demolition in a controlled setting often will trip PELs.
Tears, prayers.
May this hero rest in peace.
PAPRs are generally battery-powered and can be used with a wide variety of cartridges, some of which can indeed provide protection against certain types of mercury contaminants.
The "airline" type you mention would be a supplied air respirator, which would indeed be very awkward to use in a situation such as this.
The basic rule in respiratory protection is that you first have to figure out what contaminants and what levels you need to protect against, and then figure out what type of respirator would provide adequate protection.
Based on the samples taken, it doesn't appear many measurable contaminants were around, so minimal protection should have been needed.
Unfortunately, the disagreeable nature of an odor bears no necessary relationship to its health effects.
Cyanide gas is said to smell like fresh almonds. (How they ever found this out is a good question!)
Carbon monoxide and many other highly toxic gases are odorless.
Durian fruit has supposedly one of the foulest odors ever detected, but as far as I know no negative health effects.
The particulates and gases put in the air by the collapse of the Towers may have had toxic effects. But the sample data posted by the EPA doesn't support such a conclusion. That data may be incomplete or lying, but I don't know what other data is available.
I'd rather wait for the autopsy.
Don't answer if you're not allowed to, but does the mercury act to regulate the neutrons' speed in such a way that it maximizes the fission cross section?
You mean like this?
I was talking to SheLion about health effects.
was = wasn't
If regs don't stop rescue workers from rotating and using reasonable caution (face masks, or whatever each emergency mandates), then the supervisors aren't doing their job.
There were a lot of non-NY rescue teams that traveled to NYC after 9/11 who shared the work. I read story after story after story of rescuers who pushed themselves obsessively to sift through the rubble, many of whom have paid a high price for not rotating out often enough. I am not dissing the 9/11 rescuers. I'm pointing out that this is something that emergency response personnel should be considering when laying out their ops plans. Why let good men waste their lives due to overexposure?
Sir, I can't go into that. However, I met with Boat's QC guys and they TOLD me that if my firm wanted to do business with Electric Boat that every pound, ton, truckload of steel delivered inside the gates of the yard would have to be accompanied by our freight document stating that there was no Hg content. Further, before Boat would process our plates and structurals, they require mill certs stating the same. Finally, each piece of steel had to have traces back to the mill, heat, ingot and rolling cycle.
I went down this road because I felt that if we were "Nuke Certified," further Navy contracts and DoD certifications would be a cake-walk.
The guys from Boat came out and inspected our manufacturing facility. All of the Hg-vapor high intensity lighting were replaced per Boat's specs. We spent a few hundred K retrofitting LIGHTING!
Long term? We were flooded with contracts from GE Large Steam Turbine in Schenectady, NY. That's where we ultimately made a ton of money... the commercial / private sector. I used Boat as a learning curve in growing our U$D6 million pre-processing steel business into a U$D 25 million dollar business.
Congrats on the growth of your business!
How sad. Prayers for his family.
I remember seeing photos of the workers not wearing breathing protection and could not believe it when I saw it. I'm SURE those respirators are HOT and highly uncomfortable, however, that is certainly better than black lung. I have a feeling this illness and death won't be the last as a result of the cleanup of the
ISLAMIC ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY.
There were a lot of brave, heroic folks at Ground Zero during the aftermath of 9-11. Unfortunately, many of them, did not use the proper safty equipment.
I would definitely question that assessment for anyone immediately caught in the huge dust cloud that appeared upon the collapse of those buildings.
As far as PEL's, within the past decade or two, it was legal for a person to breath in approximately 16,000,000 fibers of asbestos 2 microns in length or longer. Even though the permissible exposure level's (PEL's) for a certain contaminent may have not been exceeded on 9/11, the co-carinogenic effect of a large number of hazardous materials could have been devasting to one's overall health, in my layman's opinion.
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