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Clinton seeks $1.9B, faults ex-EPA official

BY GLENN THRUSH | Newsday Washington Bureau

September 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is calling for $1.9 billion in new medical aid for Ground Zero workers, saying it's needed because former Environmental Protection Administration chief Christie Todd Whitman failed to alert workers to health risks.

Clinton had hoped to get a Senate floor vote yesterday on an amendment creating a five-year health screening and treatment program for World Trade Center workers sickened by toxic smoke and dust.

But she was thwarted by the Senate's GOP majority, who referred the measure to committee, where it will take months to be voted on - if ever.

"The EPA under then-administrator Christie Todd Whitman, consistently stated that the air was safe," said Clinton, who had hoped to tack the measure onto the ports security bill working its way through the Senate this week.

Whitman recently blamed city officials in 2001 for not enforcing the use of mask and other protective gear at Ground Zero, a charge rejected by most of New York's elected officials.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Homeland Security committee, said she was concerned that Clinton's amendment "limits the nearly $2 billion in funding to only in New York, that just doesn't seem fair to me."

Clinton said she wasn't opposed to adding non-New Yorkers. But she argued that workers at the Pentagon and at the crash site of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., weren't exposed to the same dangers as Ground Zero workers were.

"Apparently, the rescue workers at the Pentagon were given respiratory equipment, were given appropriate garb to wear, were put into decontamination showers," the New York Democrat added.

Clinton's comments come days after doctors at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center reported that more 70 percent of 10,000 trade center workers screened are suffering long-term health effects from their work at the site.