The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [37]
New York firefighters had reason, historically, to fear such pollutants. “We lost quite a few firemen back in the seventies in a telephone building fire,” remembered Salvatore Torcivia. “They were exposed to PCBs when all the transformers in that building burned and they didn’t have the proper equipment to protect themselves. Numerous guys died the first year from cancer. Over the next five to twenty years, all the guys from that job died. The majority went within the first ten years.”
Torcivia worked at Ground Zero every day for two weeks. “There’s gonna be a lot of people sick from this,” he forecast later,
and not just firemen. I wasn’t wearing a mask the whole time … They issued us these paper masks used for painting, but they don’t stop anything … From day one, everyone was complaining of the cough and the sore throats … The second day or third day I was getting told by private test groups at the site that the contaminants in the air were off the charts. They were so high they couldn’t register them. But we were also being told by the city and the state that everything was within the range where it’s not gonna harm anyone. That just wasn’t so.
The firefighter coughed as he talked, a cough that seemed to come from deep inside his chest. He had begun having problems within a month of 9/11.
Going on the normal runs, we noticed that a lot of us were getting winded more easily … On regular walk-ups, where I never had a problem before, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I couldn’t catch my breath … I went to the Fire Department surgeon … They found out that I’ve dropped around 40 to 45 percent of my breathing capacity since the last time I was tested … I went to see a specialist. He explained to me that all the stuff that got into my body down at Ground Zero—I didn’t just inhale it into my lungs and bronchial tubes—I ingested it … And everything working together is keeping it constantly inflamed and infected … There’s four to five hundred guys with breathing problems.
Salvatore Torcivia’s problems were far from unusual. A 2007 study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the New York City Fire Department noted a huge increase in the number of firefighters suffering from the lung ailment sarcoidosis. Some two thousand firefighters had at that point reportedly been treated for serious respiratory ailments.
“The World Trade Center dust,” the college’s Dr. David Prezant has noted, “is a combination of the most dense, intense particulate matter [first responders] were ever exposed to in an urban environment.”
The respiratory ailments have continued to increase, affecting not only firefighters but policemen, emergency medical personnel, and those who worked on the rubble removed from Ground Zero.
Many have succumbed to their illnesses. In a landmark decision in 2007, the New York medical examiner ruled that the 9/11 dust cloud contributed to the death as early as five months afterward of a young attorney from sarcoidosis. As in the case of all victims of the attacks, the cause of her death was registered as homicide.
According to figures published in late 2008 by the New York congressional delegation, 16,000 9/11 responders and 2,700 people who lived near Ground Zero were at that time “sick and under treatment.”
Reports in 2009 suggested that some 479 people, from different walks of life, had died from illnesses that may be attributable to the condition of the air during and after the 9/11 attacks. One by one, news reports show, others continue to die.
In late 2010, when deaths from illness among first responders had risen to 664—many of them from causes suspected to be related to 9/11—Congress acknowledged the gravity of the problem.
The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named for a New York policeman who had died of pulmonary fibrosis at thirty-four, earmarked $4.2 billion to address the health needs of the long-term victims of 9/11.
“We will never forget the selfless courage demonstrated by the firefighters, police officers, and the first responders who risked