Residents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn sued the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday accusing the agency of issuing misleading statements about the health effects of the collapse of the World Trade Center. The lawsuit said the EPA’s actions “left many thousands of individuals, adults and children alike, unnecessarily exposed to potentially hazardous levels of asbestos and possibly other carcinogens and toxic substances.” Former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, is accused of having “a shockingly deliberate indifference to human health.”