CONSCIENCE-SHOCKING! Filled with fear and despair, people fled the vicinity of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. Over subsequent days, much attention focused on celebrating the workers who worked long shifts to search for survivors, put out the fires, and clear out the wreckage. Lip service was paid to advising those workers to wear protective masks, but it was asking a lot of them to do so on those long rotations...and I believe they kept up the feverish pitch of their work without wearing the proper protective devices.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's Christine Whitman and her EPA issued statements assuring residents that the environment was safe. Eventually, those claims were found to be unsubstantiated. For weeks, months, and then years, area residents didn't know what to do; should they, for example, seal off their apartments and offices or air them out? Some programs were established to test or clean ofices and apartments, but those programs were not thoroughgoing.

In 2004, residents, students, and workers in lower Manhattan brought a class-action suit against Whitman and the EPA for endangering their health by their actions and statements soon after the attack.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts declined to grant Whitman immunity in the case. She called Whitman's post-9/11 assurances "conscience-shocking." In her 83-page decision, Judge Batts wrote that "No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws."