EPA Releases Draft Plan for Testing for Residual WTC Dust By Etta Sanders Nearly four years after the collapse of the World Trade Center sent a cloud of noxious dust over Lower Manhattan and across the East River to Brooklyn, the Environmental Protection Agency has released the draft of a plan to test for lingering contaminants in offices and apartments. The plan calls for the sampling of 150 buildings below Houston Street in Manhattan and along the Brooklyn waterfront. The EPA will look for so-called "signature dust" containing asbestos and other contaminants known to have been in the WTC dust. One of the primary identifiers will be slag wool, an insulator that was used in the towers. The EPA will clean any buildings found to have a level of contaminants over a certain threshold. The sampling plan comes after a year of advisory input from the EPA World Trade Center Expert Technical Review Panel, an independent body formed at the urging of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Downtown residents, politicians and environmental advocates, who have been consistently critical of the agency, quickly denounced the plan as insufficient. They said that too few buildings will be tested and too few spaces within those buildings will be inspected. "The EPA's long-awaited plan has been designed in a way that is fundamentally inadequate to determine the true extent of WTC dust contamination," Nadler said in a statement. The plan is also constrained by being voluntary, requiring building owners' permission for testing. "I can't believe that many landlords are going to open their doors," said Catherine McVay Hughes, the only Downtown resident on the panel, adding that individuals cannot request an EPA inspection. "You don't have any say about whether or not your place is tested." E. Timothy Oppelt, interim chairman of the panel, said that the plan would be effective in identifying the range of contamination, and that the agency would do any follow-up cleaning. "By conducting this sampling program, we can determine the geographic extent of WTC contaminants that may remain and whether or not they are present at levels of concern," he said in a statement. "If they are, we will clean those units-entire buildings if necessary-that pose a concern." The panel discussed the EPA's proposal and took comments from the pubic at a meeting on May 24. Another meeting is tentatively planned for July. The full draft testing plan is at www.epa.gov/wtc/panel.