New York City has released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records about air quality following the September 11, 2001, attacks, showing city officials at the time knew conditions around Ground Zero were unsafe to breathe despite repeated assurances to the public.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the release at a news conference Tuesday.
“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of September 11th whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mamdani said. “Now, close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed on the day itself.”
At least 140,000 people from all 50 states have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, and 49,000 have been diagnosed with certified WTC-related cancers, according to the 9/11 Memorial. Mamdani said Tuesday that more people are eligible for assistance than are currently enrolled, including residents who lived near the site but have not received outreach and those who live outside of New York.
My dad’s best friend just died of 9/11-related COPD. He worked in an office building around the corner from the WTC and was told to keep coming to work. He suffered greatly for many years.
Thanks for the comment. This really provided some needed framing. My initial reaction to this was, “oh well, what was there to be done? Those first few days and weeks were utter chaos. There were an unknown number of people still alive under the rubble with limited time to get them out. Immediate deaths vs long term deaths, what could have really been done? Ultimately the people are responsible are the ones that took down the towers.”
But your comment really reframed things for me. I was thinking of this only from the perspective of rescue workers. And I imagine if they had told the actual first responders about the risk and air quality, most of them would have shrugged, said, “I don’t care, I’m here to save lives,” and took the risk willingly. But there are two issues with this. First, even if the first responders would still willingly take the risk, more efforts could have been taken to provide more and better PPE for the rescuers. Second, a lot of people didn’t actually need to be anywhere near ground zero. All of the office buildings within a dangerous distance should have been evacuated. Companies still need to keep operating, but alternate arrangements could have been made. This was before the era that WFH was really possible for most office workers, but we still could have found a way. For example, we could have set up cubicles on the floors of sports arenas, using them as temporary offices like we use them as temporary shelters during natural disasters. Hell, with all of the money flying around post 9/11, simply writing checks to cover the salaries of everyone under a mandatory office evacuation for a few months would have been a rounding error compared to the hundreds of billions dedicated to defense and military expansion.
Wikipedia suggests 400,000 people were exposed to the dust of 9/11. Let’s say this is an underestimate and let’s make it a clean million. Let’s make a generous assumption and assume those million people were earning on average $50,000 in 2001 dollars, slightly less than the equivalent of $100k today. Let’s say we would need to evacuate them for three months while things settle out of the air, the rain washes every surface, and we cleaned, decontaminated, and contained the pollutants. That comes to $12,500 per person, and a total of $12.5 billion. We spent trillions in the post-9/11 years.
Sounds like there needs to be a lawsuit.
Not that it will bring any peace to your dad’s friend/family, but to hold these people accountable. If they aren’t held responsible it’ll just happen again to the next shmuck.