Asbestos Podcast EP41 Transcript

Episode 41: September 11, 2001

Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.

Episode Information
Series	Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making
Season	1
Episode	41
Title	September 11, 2001
Arc	Arc 8 — The Reckoning (Chapter 6)
Era Covered	1966–2001 — World Trade Center construction through the collapses, with the health record carried forward to the present
Produced by	Charles Fletcher
Research and writing	Charles Fletcher with Claude AI
Listen	Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Episode page	Episode 41 on Mesothelioma Lawyers Near Me

Episode Summary

Episode 41 pays off the number that opened the entire series. The South Tower, struck second on September 11, 2001, collapsed 56 minutes after impact; the North Tower stood for 102 minutes — and the North Tower alone carried sprayed asbestos fireproofing on its lower floors. The conclusion writes itself, and the episode spends its length taking it apart against the federal investigation.

NIST attributed the South Tower's faster collapse to more severe core damage — ten core columns severed against six in the North Tower — and to fire-driven weakening of the east and south perimeter, not to what the fireproofing was made of. The aircraft impacts physically stripped spray-on insulation from structural steel in both towers: 43 of 47 core columns in the North Tower and 39 of 47 in the South, across roughly 60,000 and 80,000 square feet of floor trusses. NIST concluded the buildings would likely not have collapsed had the insulation not been widely dislodged — and, in the very next sentence, that the insulation's thickness and condition before impact "did not play a governing role in the initiation of building collapse." Fireproofing composition appears nowhere in NIST's seven collapse factors, and NIST never tested the asbestos-containing product at all.

The quietest fact is the one that ends the argument. Application of the asbestos product, Cafco BLAZE-SHIELD Type D, was discontinued in 1970 at the 38th floor of WTC 1 — and both aircraft struck far above it, so the insulation dislodged in both impact zones was the non-asbestos substitute. The episode then names the myth's author and its date: a column titled "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives," published September 14, 2001, three days after the attacks, blaming Dr. Irving Selikoff by name and claiming asbestos had been sprayed to the 64th floor — a figure the same author silently revised to the 38th floor in a 2007 retelling.

From there the episode turns to the real asbestos story of that day: the dust. Settled dust was roughly 98% coarse particles — pulverized cement, gypsum and glass fiber — strongly alkaline at pH 9.2–11.5, with chrysotile asbestos at 0.8–3.0% by mass. EPA evaluated outdoor air against a school re-entry clearance criterion its own Inspector General later stated was not a health-based standard, and found the agency's early assurance that the air was safe to breathe was not supported by the data available at the time. The episode closes on the arithmetic: six mesotheliomas documented among 17,449 WTC survivor-program members through the end of 2024, against an occupational median latency of at least 32 years that places the median mark for 9/11 exposures in 2033.

Key Takeaways

The collapse-time gap is real, and it is not about asbestos. WTC 2 stood 56 minutes after impact and WTC 1 stood 102; NIST traced the difference to more severe core damage in the South Tower — ten core columns severed versus six — and to fire-driven perimeter weakening. The impacts stripped the fireproofing off the steel regardless of what it was made of. 43 of 47 core columns in WTC 1 and 39 of 47 in WTC 2 were stripped on at least one floor, along with roughly 60,000 and 80,000 square feet of floor trusses. NIST's own sentence closes the question. The towers would likely not have collapsed had the insulation not been widely dislodged — and the insulation's pre-impact thickness and condition "did not play a governing role in the initiation of building collapse." The asbestos was not in the wound. Application stopped at the 38th floor of WTC 1 in 1970, and both planes struck far above it, so the insulation dislodged in both impact zones was the non-asbestos product. The supplier was not Johns-Manville. The Port Authority contract record names Cafco BLAZE-SHIELD Type D from U.S. Mineral Products Company of Stanhope, New Jersey, applied by Mario & DiBono Plastering under Contract WTC-113.00; the Manville name appears nowhere in the NIST investigation volumes. The switch came two years before any ban. New York City issued emergency restrictions on spraying asbestos on April 13, 1970; WTC spraying stopped on April 20, 1970, ahead of the city ban effective February 1972 and the federal spray prohibition of April 1973. The myth has a name and a date. "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives" was published September 14, 2001; its central claim of asbestos to the 64th floor is unsupported by any construction record and became the 38th floor in the author's own 2007 retelling. The dust was mostly the building. Roughly 98% coarse particles, pH 9.2–11.5, with chrysotile asbestos at 0.8–3.0% by mass — caustic enough to injure airways on its own. The yardstick was borrowed. EPA had no health-based benchmark for airborne asbestos and evaluated outdoor air against a school clearance criterion; its Inspector General found the early "safe to breathe" statement was not supported by the data available at the time. The clock is still running. Six mesotheliomas through December 31, 2024 among 17,449 survivor-program members, against a median occupational latency of at least 32 years — putting the median mark for 9/11 exposures at 2033.

Key Concepts

The Myth That Asbestos Made the North Tower Stand Longer: The inference that because the asbestos-fireproofed North Tower stood 102 minutes and the non-asbestos South Tower fell in 56, the asbestos bought the difference. The federal record refutes it three ways: the impacts stripped the fireproofing from the steel regardless of composition; fireproofing chemistry appears in none of NIST's seven collapse factors; and both impact zones lay far above the 38th floor, so the dislodged insulation in both towers was the non-asbestos product. The claim has a named author and a publication date, and its central factual assertion was silently revised by that author six years later.

Impact-Dislodged Fireproofing: NIST's finding that the aircraft impacts physically stripped spray-on fireproofing from structural steel — 43 of 47 core columns in WTC 1, 39 of 47 in WTC 2, plus tens of thousands of square feet of trusses — corroborated by ballistic debris-impact testing showing the coating loses adhesion to steel under impact. The operative variable is mechanical adhesion, not chemistry. NIST's thermal and ballistic tests used the mineral-wool materials; the asbestos-containing product was never tested.

The AHERA Threshold Problem: EPA evaluated post-9/11 outdoor air against a criterion developed for clearing school buildings after asbestos abatement, set in 1987 at the contamination level then found on blank collection filters. EPA's Inspector General stated the agency had no health-based benchmark for airborne asbestos at all, and that the early statement the air was safe to breathe was not supported by the data available at the time.

Mesothelioma Latency as a Public Clock: Occupational mesothelioma almost never appears early — 96% of cases at least 20 years after first exposure, with a median of at least 32 years. Six mesotheliomas documented through 2024 in the survivor-clinic population, at 15–19-year intervals in the first four described cases, sit at the short end of that distribution; the authors' framing is that close watching is imperative, not that the risk has passed.

Relative Potency Is Not Zero Potency: Chrysotile — the asbestos type in the WTC dust — sits at the weaker end of the fiber-potency range for mesothelioma, but EPA's 2024 rule classifies it as a known human carcinogen causing mesothelioma and lung, ovarian and laryngeal cancers. When the "mostly chrysotile, mostly brief exposure" reassurance argument was made about the WTC in 2004, the published reply was that neither factor conveys protection.

What the Episode Declines to Say: The episode states on-mic that no reliable figure exists for how much asbestos remained in the towers on September 11 — the widely quoted tonnage traces to an uncited assertion — and it declines to use a widely circulated dust-resuspension multiplier that traces to an unpublished personal communication. Both are named and set aside rather than repeated.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did asbestos fireproofing make the North Tower stand longer on 9/11?

No — and that is the finding of the federal investigation, not an opinion about it. NIST attributes the South Tower's faster collapse (56 minutes versus the North Tower's 102) to more severe core damage from the aircraft impact — ten core columns severed versus six — and to the time fires took to weaken the perimeter on the east and south faces. The impacts stripped the fireproofing from the steel in both towers, and NIST found the towers would likely not have collapsed had the insulation not been widely dislodged, while its thickness and condition played no governing role. Both planes hit far above the 38th floor, where asbestos application stopped in 1970 — so the fireproofing dislodged in both impact zones was the non-asbestos product. Fireproofing composition appears nowhere in NIST's seven-factor list of collapse causes, and NIST never tested the asbestos-containing product.

Who supplied the asbestos fireproofing for the World Trade Center?

The Port Authority contract record names Cafco BLAZE-SHIELD Type D — asbestos fiber in a portland cement binder — made by U.S. Mineral Products Company of Stanhope, New Jersey, and applied by Mario & DiBono Plastering Company under Contract WTC-113.00. The widely repeated claim that Johns-Manville supplied it is not supported: the name appears nowhere in the NIST investigation volumes. After New York City's April 1970 restrictions halted spraying, the substitute was BLAZE-SHIELD Type DC/F — the same manufacturer's product with mineral wool in place of asbestos. Monokote, often named as the substitute, was evaluated in May 1970 and rejected on thermal conductivity.

Who started the claim that asbestos made the towers stand longer?

The claim has an author and a date. On September 14, 2001 — three days after the attacks — columnist Steven Milloy published "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives," blaming Dr. Irving Selikoff by name. The column asserted the asbestos had been sprayed up to the 64th floor; no construction record supports that figure, and Milloy's own 2007 follow-up silently changed it to the 38th floor — matching the NIST record. The claim was amplified in the British press that same week and later argued at book length. The New York Times examined the question as a question; it did not endorse the claim.

What was actually in the 9/11 dust cloud?

The landmark chemical analysis found the settled dust was roughly 98% coarse particles — pulverized cement, gypsum and glass fibers — strongly alkaline at pH 9.2–11.5, caustic enough to injure airways directly. Chrysotile asbestos measured 0.8–3.0% of mass across three bulk samples, and the dust also carried lead, PAHs, PCBs and dioxins. Independent USGS sampling found chrysotile at trace levels under 1% in about two-thirds of more than 35 sampling locations, with no amphibole asbestos detected in any dust sample. How much asbestos remained in the towers on September 11 has never been established from the construction record; the figure in wide circulation traces to an uncited assertion and is not used in this episode.

How many mesothelioma cases have been linked to 9/11 dust exposure?

As of December 31, 2024 — the most recent published count — the WTC Environmental Health Center, which treats community survivors rather than rescue workers, had documented six mesotheliomas among its 17,449 members. The earlier case series describing the first four reported intervals from September 11 of fifteen to nineteen years and could not identify any asbestos exposure other than WTC dust for those patients — which the authors note is not the same as ruling one out. The classic occupational median latency is at least 32 years from first exposure, putting the median mark for 9/11 exposures in 2033. The federal WTC Health Program does not publish a mesothelioma count.

Can people exposed to 9/11 dust file compensation claims?

Yes — and the avenues are separate. Depending on their exposure history, responders, residents, area workers and students may qualify for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, for the WTC Health Program's monitoring and treatment, for asbestos trust fund claims, and for civil lawsuits. Qualifying for one does not cancel the others. A lifelong occupational asbestos history is not required: exposure from a place or an event can support a claim. Danziger & De Llano, the firm featured in this episode, maps every source a family qualifies for and files them together, with cases in all fifty states. Consultations are free, seven days a week, at dandell.com.

Full Transcript

Host 1: We opened this whole series with a number. Episode One, the very first thing we ever said to you. September 11th, 2001. The South Tower, struck second, fell in fifty-six minutes. The North Tower stood for a hundred and two — nearly twice as long. And we told you the one structural difference between them: the North Tower had asbestos fireproofing on its lower floors. The South Tower didn't. Then we left it there, and walked back four and a half thousand years to a pot in Finland. Forty episodes later, we owe you the rest of that sentence.

Host 2: And I know this show. So before you say it — are we about to tell people asbestos saved the North Tower? Because that is the version that lives on the internet, and it has a very specific fingerprint. And this time, we know whose fingerprint it is.

Host 1: We are not. We went back through the federal investigation — all eight volumes, line by line — and the claim does not survive them. Today we tell you what actually happened, who sold you the myth, and why the true story is worse.

Host 2: Today on Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making—

Host 1: Episode 41: September 11, 2001.

Host 2: The number that opened the series. And the myth we're here to take apart.

Host 2: Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is brought to you by Danziger and De Llano, for the families still counting a latency that began on the worst day in the country's memory. dandell.com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Host 1: Start with what's true, because a lot of it is. Ground was broken on the World Trade Center site in 1966, and the towers' steel started going up in 1968. During early construction, sprayed asbestos fireproofing went onto the North Tower's steel — a product called Cafco BLAZE-SHIELD Type D, asbestos fiber in a cement binder. The federal investigation states the cutoff five separate times: the asbestos spray stopped at the thirty-eighth floor. That's the number this show has used since Episode One, and it holds.

Host 2: One tower, coated a third of the way up. And the other?

Host 1: The Port Authority's own engineers, answering the investigators decades later, drew the line a little differently — asbestos product on the floor trusses of what they called Zone One, the forty-fourth floor and below. Either way, it's the bottom third of one tower. And it is nowhere near the floors the planes hit. Keep hold of that fact. It's the one the myth needs you to forget.

Host 1: Then the timeline everyone gets wrong. On April 13th, 1970, New York City issued emergency restrictions on spraying asbestos insulation. Not a ban — restrictions. Within a week, the spray crews at the World Trade Center had been served five summonses — one for each working day — and by April 20th, all spraying on the site stopped. The city's outright ban came the following year, effective February 1972. The national ban, from EPA, in April 1973.

Host 2: So the switch happened before the ban.

Host 1: Two years before. And the Port Authority's own memos tell you why. The health evidence had arrived — Irving Selikoff's Mount Sinai group is in these documents by name, advising on the substitution. The same Selikoff from Episode Thirty. And the steel contractor's side wrote down the other reason out loud: the bad public relations of continuing with asbestos, even if the regulations might have let them. In 1970, everyone in that room already knew.

Host 2: So what went on the steel instead?

Host 1: BLAZE-SHIELD Type DC/F. Same manufacturer, same product line — mineral wool in place of the asbestos, from the thirty-eighth floor of the North Tower upward, and all the way up the South Tower. It was not Monokote, whatever the internet tells you. Monokote was evaluated in May of 1970 and rejected — its thermal conductivity didn't meet the specification.

Host 2: And the manufacturer? Because forty episodes in, I have a guess. It rhymes with "cons-ranville."

Host 1: Everybody's guess. It was ours too — the first draft of this episode said "reportedly Johns-Manville." So we went back to the record. Two thousand pages of the federal investigation, and the name Manville appears nowhere in them. The Port Authority's contract records name the supplier plainly: the U.S. Mineral Products Company, of Stanhope, New Jersey. The spraying itself was done by a plastering firm called Mario and DiBono.

Host 2: The biggest asbestos company in America — and this building wasn't even theirs.

Host 1: The industry was bigger than one company. That's almost the point.

Host 2: So. The towers are hit, one falls in fifty-six minutes and one stands for a hundred and two, and the tidy conclusion writes itself: the asbestos held the North Tower up. Take it apart.

Host 1: Three facts do it. First: the South Tower's wound was worse where it counted. The plane that hit it severed ten of the building's core columns — the North Tower lost six — and it struck off-center, so the core above the impact zone leaned. After the building survived the initial hit, NIST says, the clock was set by how long the fires took to weaken the perimeter on the east and south faces.

Host 2: And the explanation everybody gives — the South Tower was hit lower, so there was more building pressing down on the wound?

Host 1: Everybody gives it. We went looking for it in the federal report. It isn't there. NIST lists seven factors that led to the collapses. Impact height is not one of them. The weight above the hole is not one of them. And fireproofing chemistry is not on the list at all.

Host 1: Second fact — the one that ends the myth. The impacts stripped the fireproofing off the steel. In the North Tower: forty-three of forty-seven core columns stripped on at least one floor; sixty thousand square feet of floor trusses left bare. In the South Tower: thirty-nine of forty-seven columns; eighty thousand square feet. And NIST didn't just model it — they fired debris at coated steel in a ballistic lab. The coating doesn't just break on impact. It loses its grip on the steel and lets go.

Host 2: So the fireproofing that supposedly saved the North Tower wasn't on the steel anymore where it mattered.

Host 1: And here is the sentence the myth dies on. NIST wrote that the towers would likely not have collapsed under the aircraft damage and the fires if the insulation had not been widely dislodged. Then, in the very next sentence: the thickness and the condition of the insulation before the impact did not play a governing role in the collapse. Not the thickness. Not the condition. And what the insulation was made of — composition — never comes up at all.

Host 1: Third fact. The quietest one. Both planes hit far above the thirty-eighth floor. The fireproofing stripped off the steel in both impact zones was the non-asbestos product. The asbestos wasn't even there. There is no version of that morning where the asbestos saved anyone — because the asbestos wasn't in the wound.

Host 2: One paper, though. Because somebody will email it to us.

Host 1: One paper — November 2001, before any investigation existed — argued the substitute material was less durable in service. Even it conceded the two products had the same fire rating. And NIST never tested the asbestos product at all: its thermal tests and its ballistic tests all used the mineral-wool materials. There is no federal test result, anywhere, that supports the claim.

Host 2: And somebody still dressed it up on purpose.

Host 1: We can name him, because he put his name on it. September 14th, 2001 — three days after the attacks, while the pile was still burning — a columnist named Steven Milloy published a piece titled "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives." It blames Irving Selikoff by name. The man from Episode Thirty — who spent half a century proving what this fiber does to a lung — three days after the towers fell, he's the villain of the column, and the mineral is the hero. The New York Times asked the question as a question that same week. Milloy answered it as a sales pitch.

Host 2: There it is. The single most on-brand sentence in four thousand five hundred years. Three thousand people are dead in the rubble of the two most famous buildings on earth, and the reflex — the immediate, reptilian reflex — is "this is a marketing opportunity." Marco Polo debunked the fire-lizard in Episode One. This is the fire-lizard in a suit, standing on a grave, selling wool.

Host 1: And here's how you know it's a lizard and not a fact. Milloy's column said the asbestos went up to the sixty-fourth floor. No construction record says sixty-four. The record says thirty-eight. Six years later he told the story again — and his own number had quietly become thirty-eight. The myth's author moved his central fact by twenty-six floors between tellings, and never said a word about it.

Host 2: Urban legends don't cite their sources. This one can't even keep its story straight.

Host 1: And it's not just ghoulish. It's backwards. Because the asbestos in that building didn't save a single life on the way down. It did the opposite on the way down. It became part of the cloud.

Host 2: The people in that cloud are proving their claims one at a time, decades later — trust funds, lawsuits, and, for many, the 9/11 fund, all separate, none canceling the others out. Danziger and De Llano maps every source a family qualifies for and files them together. dandell.com.

Host 1: When the towers came down — over the eight months that followed, the city hauled about one point eight million tons of debris off the site. How much of that mass went up as airborne dust on the day itself has never been reliably measured. And how much asbestos was still in that building on September 11th? That one, we have to file under genuinely unknown. We had a tonnage in our own notes for this episode. We took it out. You'll see "hundreds of tons" quoted — including in the scientific literature — and we chased the citation chain; it ends in a sentence with no source behind it. What we know is where the asbestos was: the bottom third of the North Tower. What nobody knows is how much of it was still there that morning, after thirty years of being sealed in place and removed floor by floor. Anyone who gives you a number is repeating a number nobody sourced.

Host 2: What was actually in the dust? Because I want to be precise the way the last episode taught me to be. It wasn't pure asbestos snow.

Host 1: It was not, and the honesty matters. The best chemical work — the Lioy study, 2002 — analyzed three bulk samples of the settled dust, collected east of the site on the fifth and sixth days. Asbestos ran zero-point-eight, zero-point-eight, and three percent by mass — all of it chrysotile, the white kind from last episode's fight. The US Geological Survey, sampling more than thirty-five spots within a kilometer, found chrysotile at trace levels — under one percent — in about two-thirds of its samples. So asbestos was one hazard among many. What the dust mostly was, was the building itself: pulverized cement, gypsum, glass fiber — ninety-eight percent of it coarse particles — and strongly alkaline, pH nine to eleven and a half. Caustic enough to burn an airway on its own. Plus lead. Dioxins. A whole periodic table.

Host 2: So the quick sickness — the cough, the scarred lungs — that's the concrete and the caustic dust doing its work in months.

Host 1: Right away. The asbestos is the part that waits. It always waits. And here the official record gets uncomfortable. EPA analyzed close to ten thousand outdoor air samples, at up to sixty sites. Thirty of them exceeded the federal threshold in September alone, and seven more between October and the following May. But listen to what that threshold was. It wasn't a health standard. It was a school clearance criterion — set in 1987, at the level of contamination then found on the blank filters used to collect the samples. The government's own Inspector General audited the response and said it plainly: EPA had no health-based benchmark for airborne asbestos at all. And its early statement that the air was safe to breathe, quote, "was not supported by the data available at the time."

Host 2: So the "it's fine now" reading was a schoolyard yardstick, held up to outdoor air, while the dust sat inside people's homes.

Host 1: And it was inside. Through blown-out windows, through ventilation systems — and it stayed. That November and December, the city health department and the federal ATSDR tested fifty-seven Lower Manhattan apartments. Asbestos in the settled dust of about one in six — and in none of the comparison apartments farther away. The air in those apartments tested at background. Fifty-seven apartments is a small sample, not a census. But the dust was in people's homes, months later.

Host 1: And it did not stay put. It was fine, it was dry, and it went back into the air at a footstep, a broom, a draft from a vent. You'll see a claim that it was ten to ten thousand times more likely to resuspend than ordinary dust. We chased that number too. It traces to a consultant's unpublished analysis, passed along as a personal communication — no study you can read, no method you can check. So we won't say it. What the published science does say is enough: the exposure did not end when the cloud settled.

Host 2: Hold that thought — actually, hold it for next week. It's the entire next episode.

Host 1: For today, the asbestos question is: what does that dust do on a fifty-year clock? And the honest answer is, we're barely into it. As of the end of 2024 — the most recent count published — the clinic that treats WTC survivors, community members rather than rescue workers, had documented six mesotheliomas among its seventeen and a half thousand members. The 2024 case series that described the first four gave intervals from that day of about fifteen to nineteen years. Short, for this disease. In each of those four, the doctors could not identify any asbestos exposure other than the WTC dust — which is not the same as ruling one out, and the authors say so themselves.

Host 2: Six cases, in a population that size. Somebody will hear that as "so it wasn't a problem."

Host 1: The authors hear it the opposite way. Their words: it is imperative to keep watching. Because of the arithmetic. The standard reference here is a 1992 review of more than a thousand occupational cases. Ninety-six percent of mesotheliomas showed up at least twenty years after a worker's first exposure. The median was at least thirty-two years. At least. And that's a clock built from people exposed on the job, year after year — it does not transfer cleanly to a single day in September. But if it runs anywhere near that long: September 11th, plus thirty-two years, is 2033. We are recording this in 2026.

Host 2: So six isn't the count. It's the first knock on the door.

Host 1: The front edge. And the exposed population is enormous. When the city built the WTC Health Registry, it estimated that nearly four hundred ten thousand people were eligible — responders and volunteers, people who worked in or passed through Lower Manhattan that morning, residents south of Canal Street, schoolchildren and staff. That's a frame, not a measurement; nobody can reconstruct the dose any one person breathed. Just over seventy-one thousand people enrolled in the Registry. The federal health program that grew out of all of this counts a hundred forty-five thousand members today.

Host 1: One more honest thing, because it gets used as comfort and it shouldn't be. The asbestos in that cloud was chrysotile — the weaker end of the potency range. Weaker is not safe. EPA's 2024 rule calls chrysotile a known human carcinogen that causes mesothelioma, full stop. In 2004, a scientist made exactly the comfort argument about the World Trade Center — mostly chrysotile, mostly brief exposure, so probably little harm. Philip Landrigan's published reply was that neither of those things conveys protection. Relative potency is not zero potency.

Host 2: So the real payoff to Episode One's number isn't "asbestos saved a tower." It's: asbestos was in the building. It wasn't where the planes hit. It saved no one. It went into the air. And the youngest people who breathed it — the schoolchildren — are only now entering the years when mesothelioma starts; Congress has just chartered a research cohort to follow exactly them. The clock that started on Nellie Kershaw is now ticking under the most watched day in modern history. If the wave comes, we find out in the 2030s and 2040s.

Host 1: That's the sentence we owed you. The number was never a monument to the mineral. It was a wound of physics with a myth sold on top of it — and underneath the myth, the same story this show has always told. The fiber that was sold as protection, killing people who trusted it, on a delay long enough for everyone to look away.

Host 2: If you were down there — a responder, a resident, someone who cleaned an office in Lower Manhattan that fall — this is the part to hear. You do not need to have worked around asbestos your whole life to have a claim. Danziger and De Llano is the firm for people whose exposure came from a place, an event, a single terrible cloud — with cases in all fifty states, because the people who were there scattered to every one of them. If that's you, or someone you love, call. dandell.com — D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Host 1: Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano founded the firm in 1995. Nearly two billion dollars recovered. Over a thousand families. Cases in all fifty states.

Host 2: The consultation is free, seven days a week. dandell.com.

Host 1: You've been listening to Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making. Episode 41: September 11, 2001.

Host 2: Research, writing, and production for this series is supported by Danziger and De Llano, a national mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and nearly two billion dollars recovered for victims and their families.

Host 1: Next time: the dust settled, and the government had a choice about what to tell the people breathing it. One week after the towers fell, the head of the EPA stood up and said the air was safe to breathe. Her own Inspector General later found that statement was not supported by the data available at the time — and that the White House's environmental council had its hands on the press releases. How that sentence got written, and who edited it, is the government doing in real time what the companies in this series did in the dark.

Host 2: They had the readings. They chose the reassurance. You know this move by now.

Host 1: Episode 42: Safe to Breathe. On Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making.

Host 2: Thank you for listening.

Host 1: Thank you for listening.

Named Entities

Name	Role / Significance
World Trade Center (WTC 1 / North Tower; WTC 2 / South Tower)	Site of the series' opening mystery. WTC 1 carried sprayed asbestos fireproofing (Cafco BLAZE-SHIELD Type D) on its lower floors until application was discontinued in 1970; WTC 2 and the upper floors of WTC 1 used the non-asbestos BLAZE-SHIELD Type DC/F. WTC 2 collapsed 56 minutes after impact; WTC 1 after 102 minutes.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)	Author of the federal WTC investigation. Found the towers would likely not have collapsed had the insulation not been widely dislodged, and that insulation thickness and condition played no governing role in collapse initiation; fireproofing composition appears in none of its seven collapse factors, and the asbestos-containing product was never tested.
U.S. Mineral Products Company (Cafco)	Manufacturer of BLAZE-SHIELD Type D (asbestos) and Type DC/F (mineral wool) spray fireproofing, of Stanhope, New Jersey — the documented supplier to the WTC towers.
Mario & DiBono Plastering Company	The applicator that sprayed the WTC towers' structural steel under Port Authority Contract WTC-113.00. Spraying at the site was suspended in April 1970 following New York City's emergency restrictions.
Steven Milloy	Columnist; author of "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives," September 14, 2001 — the named, dated origin of the myth this episode dismantles. His claimed 64th-floor asbestos cutoff became the 38th floor in his own 2007 retelling, without correction.
Dr. Irving Selikoff	Mount Sinai physician-researcher (Episode 30). Named in the 1970 Port Authority correspondence advising on the WTC fireproofing substitution — and blamed by name in the September 14, 2001 column.
Dr. Philip Landrigan	Mount Sinai epidemiologist; lead author of the 2004 review of WTC health consequences. His published reply to the "mostly chrysotile, mostly brief exposure" argument: neither fiber type nor exposure duration conveys protection.
Dr. Paul Lioy	Lead author of the 2002 landmark characterization of WTC settled dust — the source of the episode's dust-composition figures.
EPA / EPA Office of Inspector General	EPA evaluated post-collapse outdoor air against a school clearance criterion. Its Inspector General found the agency had no health-based benchmark for airborne asbestos, and that EPA's early "safe to breathe" statement was not supported by the data available at the time.
WTC Health Registry / WTC Health Program / WTC Environmental Health Center	The Registry estimated a large eligible population and enrolled 71,437 people. The federal WTC Health Program publishes no mesothelioma count. The WTC Environmental Health Center survivor clinic documented six mesotheliomas among 17,449 members through December 31, 2024.
Danziger & De Llano, LLP	National mesothelioma law firm, founded 1995 by Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano. Featured sponsor of the series; cases in all fifty states.

Cases and Legal Frameworks

• NIST NCSTAR 1 (2005) — The federal investigation of the towers' collapses; source of the collapse times, impact-damage figures and the finding that insulation thickness and condition did not play a governing role in collapse initiation.
• NIST NCSTAR 1-6A (2005) — The structural fire response and collapse analysis volume; source of the BLAZE-SHIELD product record, the Port Authority contract record and the documented 1970 cutoff at the 38th floor of WTC 1.
• EPA Asbestos NESHAP (40 CFR Part 61, Subpart M) — The federal prohibition on spray-applied asbestos, promulgated in 1973. The WTC switched off asbestos in April 1970, ahead of both the New York City ban and the federal rule.
• AHERA clearance criterion — A school re-entry standard developed for clearing buildings after abatement, borrowed by EPA to evaluate outdoor air after the collapses; characterized by EPA's Inspector General as not a health-based standard.
• EPA chrysotile asbestos rule (2024) — The final rule banning ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos, classifying it as a known human carcinogen causing mesothelioma and lung, ovarian and laryngeal cancers.
• September 11th Victim Compensation Fund / WTC Health Program — Federal compensation and health-monitoring programs available to exposed responders, residents, area workers and students, separate from asbestos trust claims and civil litigation.

Key Facts and Statistics

• 56 minutes / 102 minutes — collapse times after impact, South and North Towers.
• 38th floor — where application of BLAZE-SHIELD Type D was discontinued in WTC 1 in 1970.
• 43 of 47 / 39 of 47 — core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors, WTC 1 / WTC 2, with roughly 60,000 ft² and 80,000 ft² of floor trusses stripped.
• 10 vs 6 — core columns severed, WTC 2 vs WTC 1 — NIST's stated contributor to the shorter South Tower survival time.
• 0.8–3.0% — chrysotile asbestos by mass across three settled-dust samples; roughly 98% coarse particles; pH 9.2–11.5.
• Under 1% — chrysotile by weight in about two-thirds of more than 35 USGS sampling locations, with no amphibole detected in any dust sample.
• 71,437 — people enrolled in the WTC Health Registry.
• 6 — mesotheliomas among 17,449 WTC Environmental Health Center members through December 31, 2024.
• 15–19 years — intervals from September 11 in the first four described survivor mesothelioma cases.
• At least 32 years — median mesothelioma latency in occupational cohorts, with 96% of cases at 20 years or more from first exposure.
• 2033 — the year September 11 exposures reach that 32-year median latency mark.
• September 14, 2001 — publication of "Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives," the myth's named origin.

Timeline

Date	Event
1966	Groundbreaking for the World Trade Center towers.
1968	Steel erection begins on the towers.
April 13, 1970	New York City issues emergency restrictions on spraying asbestos-containing insulation.
April 20, 1970	All spray fireproofing operations at the WTC site are suspended; the switch to non-asbestos BLAZE-SHIELD Type DC/F follows.
May 1970	Monokote evaluated as a substitute and rejected on thermal conductivity.
1970	Application of BLAZE-SHIELD Type D discontinued at the 38th floor of WTC 1.
February 1972	New York City's ban on sprayed asbestos in construction takes effect.
1973	EPA promulgates the Asbestos NESHAP — the federal spray prohibition.
September 11, 2001	American Airlines Flight 11 strikes WTC 1; United Airlines Flight 175 strikes WTC 2. WTC 2 collapses 56 minutes after impact; WTC 1 after 102 minutes.
September 14, 2001	"Asbestos Could Have Saved WTC Lives" is published — the myth's named origin.
2002	The landmark characterization of WTC settled dust is published.
2003	EPA Inspector General audit: no health-based airborne-asbestos benchmark; the early "safe to breathe" statement was not supported by the data available at the time.
2004	Published reply on WTC health consequences: neither chrysotile fiber type nor brief exposure conveys protection.
2007	The myth's author silently revises his asbestos cutoff from the 64th to the 38th floor.
2024	EPA final rule banning ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos.
December 31, 2024	Cutoff for the survivor-clinic count: six mesotheliomas among 17,449 members.
2033	September 11 exposures reach the 32-year median mesothelioma latency mark.

External Links

Primary Sources

• NIST — NCSTAR 1: Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers
• NIST — NCSTAR 1-6A: Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence
• U.S. EPA OIG — EPA's Response to the World Trade Center Collapse (2003)
• USGS — Environmental Studies of the World Trade Center Area (OFR 01-0429)
• Lioy et al. 2002 — Characterization of the WTC settled dust
• Federal Register — EPA Chrysotile Asbestos Final Rule (2024)

Health Programs and Compensation

• CDC — World Trade Center Health Program
• AsbestosTrusts.org — every active asbestos trust: what it holds, what it pays, what it requires
• AsbestosTrusts.org — Trust Directory
• Mesothelioma Compensation — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Exposure — Danziger & De Llano
• Danziger & De Llano, LLP

Series Navigation

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Arc 8: The Reckoning
Previous: Episode 40: Libby, Montana	Episode 41: September 11, 2001	Next: Episode 42: Safe to Breathe

Related Wiki Pages

• Asbestos_Podcast_EP40_Transcript — Libby, Montana: a whole town exposed without an occupation
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP39_Transcript — The Ban That Wasn't: the regulatory gap the 1970s left open
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP37_Transcript — The Trust Fund System: how trust claims are filed and what they pay
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP30_Transcript — Selikoff: the researcher named in the WTC substitution record and blamed in the 2001 column
• Asbestos_Trust_Funds — Compensation mechanisms and the trust fund filing process
• Mesothelioma_Claim_Process — Step-by-step process for filing a mesothelioma claim
• Mesothelioma_Latency_Period — Why asbestos disease appears decades after exposure
• Asbestos_History_Timeline — Full chronological history of asbestos knowledge, use, and litigation
• The_Asbestos_Podcast — Main podcast page with all episodes

About This Series

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast tracing the complete history of asbestos from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban. The series is produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP, a nationwide mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and over $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims.

Episode 41 is Chapter 6 of Arc 8 ("The Reckoning") and answers the question the series opened with. Episode 1 posed the collapse-time difference between the towers as a mystery and walked away from it; Episode 41 returns with the federal investigation in hand and dismantles the conclusion that most listeners had already drawn. It is the series' clearest demonstration of its own method: a fact can be true, an inference from it can be reasonable, and the answer can still be no.

The episode also marks a correction made on-mic. An earlier draft repeated the widespread claim that Johns-Manville supplied the World Trade Center fireproofing; the construction record names U.S. Mineral Products Company instead, and the episode says so out loud rather than quietly fixing it. Episode 42, Safe to Breathe, turns from what was in the dust to what the government told the people breathing it.