Airborne Fine and Ultrafine Particles Near the World Trade Center Disaster Site

Abstract

Documentation of the airborne fine and ultrafine particles produced by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), particularly while fires were burning, was essential for evaluating the risk of adverse health effects in people who live and work in this area. We collected airborne particles for 3 months at a site about 400 m east of the former WTC.Ultrafine particles were collected by deposition onto small detector chips for morphometric analysis by atomic force microscopy. Some chips were coated with an iron nanofilm for detection of strong acids. A condensation nucleus counter and two impactors measured particle number concentrations and size distributions. The authors are grateful to C. L. Quan, X. P. Lou, and P. Peters, who assisted with routine monitoring of the sampling equipment and the laboratory analysis of the samples, and to Drs. B. Turpin and J. Offenberg at Rutgers University for the carbon and PAH analysis. We are indebted to Mr. Michael Rawlings and Mr. Michael Barbarito of the NYU Mt. Sinai Downtown Hospital who arranged for us to use the hospital facilities and set up the sampling site. We also thank the staff and nurses who uncomplainingly put up with the inconveniences caused by our sampling.The work was made possible by an NIEHS Center Grant Number ES00260 and EPA PM10 Center Grant Number. R827351.Address correspondence to Beverly S. Cohen, New York University School of Medicine, Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine, 57 Old Forge Road, Tuxedo, NY 10987. E-mail: cohenb@env. med.nyu.ed matic hydrocarbons (PAH). About 70% of the total carbon was organic. The PAH levels ranged from 10 to 1500 ng m −3 . Overall, our data for particle mass and number concentrations did not differ substantially from data we had collected in Manhattan the previous year. The dominant organic compounds found in these samples are those most common in urban environments. These data do not suggest, but cannot rule out, an unusual risk of adverse health effects from the number, or mass, of the fine ambient particles.

Diffusion Sampler for Measurement of Acidic Ultrafine Particles in the Atmosphere

“…Two new types of iron nanofilm detectors (namely Fe-Ti-MS and Fe-MS) were developed, which were stable even after 3-month exposure to ambient air at a sampling site (Wang et al 2012); (3) development of sampling schedules based on the ambient particle number (PN) concentration. No acidic particles were detected in the previous study in New York (Cohen et al 2004b), suggesting that the method might either not be suitable for an airshed with low levels of air pollutants, or it should be improved. To ensure sufficient particles to be collected on the detectors for subsequent statistical analysis, and to avoid collected particles landing on one another resulting in underestimation of smaller particles and over-measurement of larger particles, the sampling duration was altered depending on the ambient PN concentration.…”

Review of Measurement Methods and Compositions for Ultrafine Particles

“…The larger surface-to-volume ratios in the UP fraction probably encourage this condensation. Cohen et al (2004) measured PM 2.5 PAH as high as 1,500 ng/m 3 , reflecting the intensity of emissions from fires soon after the 9/11/2001 World Trade Center attack. Fine et al (2004) sought contributions from cooking and wood burning by using levoglucosan and cholesterol as organic markers for these sources.…”

“…Gasparini et al (2004) reported TDMA measurements from Houston to evaluate hygroscopic properties. MOUDI measurements were also taken by Cohen et al (2004) in New…”

A novel semi-automatic method for measuring acidic ultrafine particles in the atmosphere

“…Only with this information can effective control measures be formulated and implemented. However, no reliable measurement techniques were available to obtain the number concentrations of AUFPs until 2012, as earlier methods can only identify the AUFPs in the atmosphere, but cannot quantify them (Wang et al, 2012;Cohen et al, 2004). Two methods were developed by our group in 2012 and 2014, respectively, to measure the AUFPs in the atmosphere with the nano-film detectors (i.e.…”