study<\/a> of people below the age of 30 on September 11, 2001, who had considerable exposure to the air at Ground Zero found that 20.1 percent had developed cancer by July 2021. \u201cMany of the cancers documented in this cohort,\u201d the authors wrote, \u201care relatively rare in the general population and especially in younger age groups.\u201d<\/p>\nAfter the attack, government officials were eager to get the city back to work.\u00a0\u201cGiven the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink,\u201d EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman said just a week after the attack. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani largely echoed that sentiment while urging rescue and recovery workers to wear masks. In the 25 years that have passed, it is clear that the decisions made to return the city to normal as quickly as possible have had the opposite impact, prolonging the tragedy of September 11 for many of us.<\/p>\n
Dana Nelson was starting her fourth day of ninth grade at Stuyvesant High School just blocks from Ground Zero when the towers fell. As she and thousands of her classmates poured out of the building, emergency workers rushed in to turn it into a triage center. She saw people covered head to toe in white dust. It was less than four weeks later that Nelson returned to school. Armed National Guard members patrolled the pedestrian bridge leading to the building. Street-cleaning trucks passed through the area frequently, spraying water on the ground to keep the dust at bay. A burning smell would waft out of the pages of textbooks when she opened them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember people walking around in Hazmat suits taking air-quality measurements while we were just, like, living normal life and doing high school,\u201d Nelson said.<\/p>\n
In 2020, 11 months after giving birth to her son, Nelson discovered a lump in her breast. She was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at 33. \u201cI was a young person,\u201d she said. \u201cI was just starting the next phase of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was already enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program after struggling for years with rhinosinusitis. Her doctor performed a lumpectomy followed by more than a year of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She\u2019s been cancer free ever since. \u201cI have gotten sick. My dad, who has since passed away but worked on Rector Street, got kidney cancer. My favorite high-school teacher has gotten breast cancer. My best friend has breast cancer right now and is in treatment for it. We went to high school together. Her mother-in-law was volunteering down there as a Lutheran minister and has gotten oral cancer. Another relative of mine, who worked downtown, has gotten uterine cancer,\u201d she said. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t know this many people who were down there who have gotten cancer at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the 9\/11 health program, people were mostly diagnosed with aerodigestive disorders \u2014 things like chronic rhinosinusitis (inflammation of the nasal and sinus passages) asthma, and gastroesophageal reflux disorder. \u201cWithin a year at the most, I began to notice that my children were getting chronically ill,\u201d Mariama James, who lived in the Southbridge Towers a few blocks east of the site with her three kids, told me. \u201cBreathing, ear infections, just over and over, like upper-respiratory issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n Dana Nelson went to school around the corner from the World Trade Center. She developed breast cancer at 33.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n
Cancer cases among enrollees took longer to develop. But they have since become the single most common diagnosis. Over the 12 months preceding August of this year, nearly 71 percent of the newly certified cases were cancer. \u201cAge is the hidden force,\u201d Crane, of Mount Sinai, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s changing everything. The risk pool changes. The population changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
With more people now getting sick, the profile of the victims of 9\/11 is changing. New enrollees are often those who worked, lived, or went to school in the area, not first responders. \u201cI thought it was just the first responders that were working on the actual towers. People that were working to find the bodies and all that,\u201d said John Mormando, who worked downtown as a commodities trader for BNP Paribas back in 2001. \u201cI didn\u2019t think it was just normal people like me, you know, just workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mormando had taken the day off to take care of his 2-year-old son at home in New Jersey on 9\/11. When he first heard about the attacks, he figured people he knew at the New York Mercantile Exchange nearby would probably be okay. The trading floor didn\u2019t open for another hour. Mormando later found out there had been an early meeting that day and nearly 25 of his acquaintances had died. Only six days later, he got a phone call telling him to head back to work. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, God, really? We\u2019re going back there?\u2019 I\u2019m looking at the news, and it still looked like a war zone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When Mormando walked onto the trading floor the following Monday, he was struck by how clean it was. Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, and Governor George Pataki rang the opening bell. \u201cThey were thanking us for getting the markets back open. It was a great patriotic thing that I thought we were doing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were telling the terrorists, \u2018You didn\u2019t win.\u2019 And it was a big rah-rah thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n Just six days after the attack, John Mormando was asked to go back to work near the World Trade Center.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n
In early 2018, Mormando was watching TV with his wife when he felt a lump on his chest. He was eventually diagnosed with male breast cancer. Mormando had recently run the New York City Marathon; he was training for an Iron Man Triathlon. After the cancer diagnosis, he had to have a mastectomy. Chemotherapy treatments blistered his feet, rendering him unable to walk, and extensive radiation left his skin with purple-colored burns.<\/p>\n
Initially, like me, Mormando didn\u2019t connect his cancer with 9\/11. But after learning that several former colleagues had gotten sick, he put it together. \u201cA lot of my friends were coming down with some weird cancers. You know, stuff that you don\u2019t normally see,\u201d he said. \u201cMy friends were getting bladder cancers and bone cancers. These are young guys.\u201d It was not until \u201cyears later, we find out that the EPA really wasn\u2019t telling the truth,\u201d Mormando said. \u201cAnd now all these people were coming down with cancer. There\u2019s no way that air was good to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whitman, the EPA administrator, told me the assurances she made at the time about the quality of the air around Ground Zero were \u201centirely based on what scientists were telling me.\u201d But she acknowledges that it\u2019s now clear the assessment of the data was inadequate and that scientists failed to understand the long-term health impacts. \u201cThere had been nothing like this. There was no yardstick to go by. There was no standard we could use,\u201d she said. \u201cNo one played with the data, and I think everyone did the best they could with the information and tools we had at the time.\u201d Still, she said she feels \u201csick to my stomach\u201d every time September 11 comes around. \u201cAlways at this time of year, I feel awful because I know people blame me. But the blame lies first and foremost with the terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Federal health officials continued to say the air was safe through December of that year. But a memo sent in October 2001 to then\u2013Deputy Mayor Robert Harding by a lobbyist working for City Hall warned that the city could potentially be hit by tens of thousands of toxic-exposure lawsuits. It predicted that the suits would claim public-health advisories led people to \u201creturn to the area too soon.\u201d It also suggested the city ask Congress to set up a victims\u2019 compensation fund \u2014 similar to the one created for families of those who had died that day \u2014 to protect the city from \u201ctoxic tort claims that might arise in the next few decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
Giuliani, whose actions after the attack led him to be dubbed \u201cAmerica\u2019s Mayor,\u201d and who based his 2008 presidential run around the perception of his heroism in leading the city through the tragedy, has insisted he only passed on information he had received from federal officials. In May of this year, after Giuliani developed life-threatening pneumonia, a spokesperson for the former mayor said his condition had been complicated by restrictive airway disease he linked to his time spent near Ground Zero. A lawyer for Giuliani, Michael Barasch, said he planned to enroll in the World Trade Center Health Program. Giuliani didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
How many people got sick because they thought the air was safe? \u201cHad the government in October, November, December said, \u2018Well, maybe we should slow down, maybe we should be more careful,\u2019 maybe less people would have been affected,\u201d said Benjamin Chevat, the former chief of staff for former congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who co-sponsored the bill that established the health program in 2011. \u201cMore importantly, maybe there would have been a response to the health problem years earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think a lot about the randomness of September 11. In talking to many survivors, responders, and people near Ground Zero it strikes me how little many of us actually have in common. Yet we are all drawn together by having passed through lower Manhattan during this one terrible moment in history.<\/p>\n
For me, the irony was that I wasn\u2019t even in New York that day. I was nearly 8,000 miles away on vacation in China, completely unaware of what was going on. It was not until I checked my email the following afternoon that I learned of the disaster at home. \u201cThe world trade center just blew up. I think everyone we know is okay. More later,\u201d a friend wrote.<\/p>\n
It took me over a week to get back to New York. The AP, where I worked as a general-assignment reporter in the New York City bureau, had made a decision early on to keep someone around the site just in case any survivors were found in the debris. I was assigned to Ground Zero for the next several weeks. No survivors were found during my shifts there, so I spent most of my time trying to talk to firefighters and other rescue workers going in and out of the site. Much of that time remains a blur to me. I filed a few minor stories and pretty much just tried to stay warm. The only thing I remember clearly was the smell from the fires.<\/p>\n
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\n Chaka Ferguson, an Associated Press reporter who would later develop cancer, after the September 11 attacks.
\n Photo: Courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n
Years later, I began experiencing occasional tightness in my throat when I swallowed. In late 2015, a scan and biopsy revealed I had a malignant nodule on the left side of my thyroid. I ended up having surgery to remove half of it. At the time, I felt lucky. Five-year survival rates for the kind of thyroid cancer I was diagnosed with are nearly 100 percent. Aside from a small scar on my neck, it was almost like it had never happened. I used to joke that if you got to choose your own cancer, this was the one you wanted.<\/p>\n
After I realized I met the criteria to be enrolled in the program, I applied. It took 14 months, but in 2020 my case was approved. Since then, I have undergone regular health-monitoring visits and all treatment related to my cancer has been paid for by the program.<\/p>\n
This was the hope when the World Trade Center Health Program came into being after President Barack Obama signed the James Zadroga 9\/11 Health and Compensation Act into law: to provide some aid to incidental victims like me. It had taken five years to get the bill through Congress, where it met significant resistance over its cost \u2014 what ultimately passed had a price tag of $4.3 billion. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy at all,\u201d recalls Congressman Jerry Nadler, the Democrat whose district included the World Trade Center and who co-sponsored the bill. \u201cRepublicans were very opposed to it. They were opposed to any compensation to New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bill set broad contours for the health program and compensation fund. But it established geographical boundaries for the exposure zone \u2014 lower Manhattan south of Houston Street for the health program; below Canal Street for the compensation fund. The requirements are specific, but anyone who lived, worked, or went to school in the exposure zone is potentially eligible. \u201cThe process is non-adversarial. This is not a lawsuit,\u201d said attorney Michael Barasch, whose firm, Barasch & McGarry, represents not just Giuliani but over 50,000 claimants. \u201cIf you meet the criteria, you\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many have argued that the boundaries that were set made little sense. The dust did not suddenly stop at Canal or Houston Street. \u201cWhen we drafted the bill, we had to make arbitrary decisions,\u201d Nadler admits. \u201cWe could have said 14th Street. And what about the people in Brooklyn? The cloud didn\u2019t stop there. So we arbitrarily chose Canal Street.\u201d He said the decision was purely a financial calculation. \u201cThe Congressional Budget Office would tell us, \u2018If you make the boundary 14th Street, it\u2019s going to cost $10 billion. If you make it Tenth Street, it\u2019s going to cost $5 billion. It\u2019s too many people,\u201d he said. \u201cCharlie Rangel, the head of the Ways and Means Committee, said, \u2018You get $4.3 billion; that\u2019s all you\u2019re going to get. Make it work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
John Feal, a retired construction worker who was injured at the site and became a prominent advocate for responders and survivors, said he believes the difficulty to secure the program stems from long-running resistance to acknowledging that mistakes had been made. \u201cNobody ever apologized. Nobody said, \u2018We lied to you.\u2019 Nobody ever said \u2018sorry.\u2019 But what they did was create the World Trade Center Health Program,\u201d he said. \u201cBut like a carrot on the end of the stick they put the program on the end of the stick, and we had to go chase it for two decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
As time has passed, resistance to the program in Congress has faded. As part of the compromise to get the bill through, it was initially funded for just five years. When the Zadroga bill was set to expire in 2016, a bill to extend it another five years passed overwhelmingly. In 2019, an effort to reauthorize the program through 2090 passed overwhelmingly.<\/p>\n
Funding for the program did come under assault last year, however, when President Donald Trump empowered Elon Musk to enact broad spending cuts across the government. Among the agencies Musk\u2019s quasi-governmental initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, targeted was the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees the health program. These cuts initially resulted in the dismissal of the health program\u2019s longtime director and about 20 percent of its roughly 90-member staff. Following a bipartisan outcry, the Trump administration walk backed those cuts and announced plans to expand staffing to 120.<\/p>\n
The program has ultimately helped a great deal of people. A 2022 study found that the mortality rate among a group of over 60,000 people who had been exposed was not markedly higher than that seen across the general population. (Though people with very high levels of exposure did seem to fare worse.) The study\u2019s authors theorized that the comprehensive medical monitoring and health services offered by the government may have improved outcomes for enrollees.<\/p>\n
Among the program\u2019s 154,700 enrollees, nearly two-thirds so far have been people responding to the attacks \u2014 rescue workers, journalists, construction workers, volunteers, and cleanup crews. The program will likely grow significantly in the coming years as more people who worked or lived in the surrounding neighborhoods realize they were exposed. Crane said there are many people who haven\u2019t connected their health issues to 9\/11. So far, the program has \u201conly succeeded in enrolling a proportion of the actual, exposed population,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Crane believes the program has also been up against a certain level of survivor\u2019s guilt where people worry their case isn\u2019t bad enough to qualify for care. Tony Stone, a friend I knew from growing up in the city and later went to college with, was raised in Tribeca. He woke on September 11 to the roar of a Boeing 767 about 1,000 feet above his building. He barely got out of the area ahead of the dust cloud after the towers collapsed. When he came home, his entire apartment was covered in dust. \u201cIt was like a construction site that\u2019s done, like, a lot of sheet rocking and taping and is covered in drywall dust. That\u2019s a lot in a 3,000-square-foot apartment,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThat first night, I got into bed; I didn\u2019t even wash the sheets or wash the blanket. We vacuumed ourselves and didn\u2019t get officially cleaned until December. Then there were the fumes, you know, that noxious smell.\u201d<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t occur to him to leave. \u201cIt was my neighborhood. I loved it. I just felt like I needed to be there,\u201d he said. \u201cI was born and raised there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Five years later, shortly before he got on a plane to Japan \u2014 only his second flight since the attacks, as post-traumatic stress had left him uneasy about flying \u2014 he went to the bathroom and spotted blood in his urine. \u201cI was just literally peeing blood and blood clots for the next 14 hours. I thought I was dying of internal bleeding and also was just totally terrified of flying, so it was just a terrible experience,\u201d he said. When he returned to the U.S., Stone saw a urologist and was ultimately diagnosed with stage-one bladder cancer. He was 27 years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was, like, the youngest patient that doctor had ever seen,\u201d Stone said. \u201cI\u2019d be in his office with all these old guys in their 60s and 70s, so he asked me, \u2018Well, what have you been surrounded by? What chemicals? What kind of exposure?\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Well, 9\/11.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The cancer was found early and had not spread, so he was able to avoid chemotherapy or radiation treatment after having surgery to remove the tumor. So far, it hasn\u2019t returned. Still, Stone has struggled with anxiety and depression. He knows so many people who have died of cancer, and it\u2019s hard not to wonder if they had also been unknowing victims of the attacks. A filmmaker, Stone now lives in Hudson, where he founded the Basilica Hudson art space with his wife, the musician Melissa Auf der Maur. \u201cFor a long time, I had this attitude that we survived and we were the lucky ones; what did we have to worry about?\u201d he said. \u201cYou did take the government at face value \u2014 which is crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
I feel that contradiction, too. Yes, the government never formally apologized. But they gave us this program, which has provided a great service to me and thousands of others. I don\u2019t dwell on the choices made in those chaotic days after the attack when we all just wanted normalcy. More care should have been taken to protect people. But I still think those of us who survived the initial attack are the lucky ones. Even if we have gotten sick, most of us are still here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took 18 years for me to realize I was a victim of September 11. In 2019, I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5301,12411,40802,9,11,10,86206,11803],"class_list":["post-337065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-9-11","tag-anniversary","tag-audio-article","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-rudy-guiliani","tag-september-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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