Shawn Moore/OSHA News Photo

An OSHA team, made up of staffers from throughout the United States, discusses air sampling procedures at the World Trade Center site. Since September 11, OSHA has taken more than 3,500 air and bulk samples for asbestos, silica, lead and other heavy metals, carbon monoxide, and numerous organic and inorganic compounds, as well as noise.

For many conference participants, a lack of information on hazards was not a problem. Rather, many spoke of difficulties trying to manage and make sense of a surplus of information. The following statements were made in four different panels:

• There was an eight o'clock safety meeting every morning. There was a nine o'clock contractor meeting every morning. Then there was an afternoon safety meeting and an evening contractor meeting. Then there was the six o'clock meeting at Pier 92. And, on top of all of that, the Fire Department and Police Department had an operational meeting every morning at seven o'clock, at a location that was completely different than where the other two meetings were going on. So it would be hard to get any work done with all the meetings. Eventually, everybody realized what was going on and said, "Okay, we have to try to put it all together," and they did. But it did get a little out of hand at first.
  
  
• [Information] would change day to day. We ended up hiring a temp . . . to do nothing but monitor all the different sites from DoD to IAFF to IAFC, CDC, NIOSH. I gave them a list of web sites and I said, "You just [put] these in a circular and you keep giving them to me so I can try and keep up with what the hell everybody's saying."
  
  
• You had a lot of entities that had their own specific mission, whether it was the EPA or the military, the FBI, the USAR teams. They all had their own unique perspective of what constituted a hazard, and what was a significant concern to them may not be a concern to another group. They all had good intentions of putting forth their information, but at times it became unnecessarily complicated. We would have crews that would go in at a certain level of protection, working right next to crews that were in an entirely different level of protection. There were questions about which one was right.
  
  
• The thing that drives me crazy, and I hate to say it, but all the experts have got to come up with a common theme. I can't have [one federal agency] telling me, "You need Level A protection for this," and [another agency] telling me that a half-faced respirator and latex gloves are sufficient.