Preparing for terrorist threats

UW graduate Carrie Sadovnik, the former Carrie (Carrel) Loewenherz, is part of the team that prepares New York City for terrorist events.

Sadovnik, an industrial hygienist, was hired by New York City’s health department as part of a federally funded team that would respond to potential environmental health impacts associated with terrorist events.

Many of the team’s efforts also support day-to-day health department functions such as environmental risk assessment and data interpretation, education, and surveillance. The team also responds to environmental emergencies such as last year's major power outage.

Nearly a decade ago, she entered our department’s master’s program with an interest in environmental conservation and botany and an assumption that she would study environmental toxicology. Not far into the program, she realized that the needs of people-—as well as ecosystems—are affected by human activities.

Sadovnik studied with Professor Richard Fenske and, as an intern, helped the city of Tacoma write its sewer utilities’ process safety management plan. She worked full-time for Tacoma, then joined The Boeing Co. At the Boeing Everett facility, she provided industrial hygiene services to a plant with 30,000 employees, dozens of warehouses, hundreds of shops, and thousands of cryptic acronyms. She found the job a “perfect training ground for a fledgling industrial hygienist,” but recalls that “my first couple of months were dizzying.”

In 1999, she returned to our department’s Field Research and Consultation Group (Field Group), which she called “a great combination of traditional industrial hygiene fieldwork, report writing, and research.” She worked with supervisors, managers, and business owners who really wanted to do the right thing and protect their workers, but lacked the means to do it. “Puget Sound businesses should count themselves lucky to have such an amazing resource as the Field Group,” she said.

She moved to New York City in 2000 and worked for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a nonprofit organization that provides free training and technical services to unions and community-based organizations. “I had to pay close attention to ensuring the integrity of my science while still acting as a worker advocate,” she said. She also taught in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

The World Trade Center attacks gave her job new meaning, she recalls. Suddenly “respirator fit testing” was a household word and discussions on the nuances of air quality could be heard on every subway platform.

As a NYCOSH industrial hygienist, she toured the World Trade Center site a week after the attacks at the request of a union local, inspected downtown work locations, and advised on various environmental health concerns. This experience helped prepare her for her current job, helping the city’s Department of Health address environmental health crises caused by terrorist attacks and other emergencies.

Her University of Washington training, which included coursework in epidemiology and biostatistics, prepared her to work with other public health professionals. She encourages students to “take all opportunities to get experience in the field; don’t pass up any internship opportunities."