401 more victims have been identified. It has been an unparalleled forensic achievement. Even so, 1,122 men and women—41 percent of the total who died—remain unidentified. The families of more than a thousand people cannot bury their loved ones.
THERE IS ANOTHER REASON, though, that the true death toll will long remain elusive. Listen again to the voices of those who endured 9/11 on the streets and in the buildings of New York City.
“I see this fifty-, sixty-story dust rolling down the block.” “The ambulances looked like they were covered with gray snow … so thick you couldn’t see a sharp edge from a smooth edge.” “People were just full of dust … looked like zombies.”
“Nobody could breathe. Everything was stuck in their throats and their eyes, mouths, faces, and everything.” “Everybody’s coughing, breathing in mouthfuls of shit.”
“Our face-pieces were on, because the probie [trainee firefighter] was having trouble with chest pains, having difficulty breathing.” “My lungs were filling up with this stuff. I don’t know what it was. I thought I was going to die.” “The sergeant asked me, ‘You think we could die from this stuff?’ I’m like, ‘Right now? No. But eventually? Yes.’ ”
Less than an hour after the second strike, a Fire Department operator had logged a phone call from a woman on Duane Street, near the Trade Center. At 9:59 the dispatcher noted:
FC—CONCERN ABOUT THE RESPIRATORY EFFECT OF THOSE PARTICLES
The person calling about the “particles” must have come across as a fusspot, her call a mere nuisance. Who had time to think, then, about the bits and pieces falling from the towers and wafting on the breeze? The material spewed out by the towers, however, did have significance—a significance that increased greatly once the towers had fallen and the walls of dust had roared up the canyons of Lower Manhattan.
“Dust” covers many evils. 9/11’s dust contained: asbestos (tests after the attacks showed hazardous asbestos levels at sites up to seven blocks from Ground Zero), lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs, and PAHs (potentially carcinogenic chemical compounds) and toxins from perhaps fifty thousand vaporized computers.
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
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 their lives to save others,” said President Obama when he signed the act. Back in September 2001, concern about the possible dangers of exposure to toxic dust and fumes had been swept aside. The Environmental Protection Agency declared after two days that initial tests were “very reassuring.” Five days later, Assistant Secretary of Labor John Henshaw said it was “safe to go back to work in New York’s financial district.” The Stock Exchange reopened on September 17, with EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman reassuring New Yorkers the next day that their air was “safe to breathe.”
There had been pressure from the start, from the very top, to get the financial district up and running. At a National Security Council meeting not twelve hours after the attacks, according to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, President Bush said, “I want the economy back, open for business right away, banks, the stock market, everything tomorrow.”
Those who knew the situation on the ground knew that opening the next day was an impossible fantasy. The President, however, had been removed from the realities.
AFTER HASTILY LEAVING Sarasota airport in Florida, at 9:55 on the morning of 9/11, Bush had spent the rest of the day aboard Air Force One, with brief stops at two U.S. military bases. “The President is being evacuated,” press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters on the plane, “for his safety and the safety of the country.”
Key civil and military aides were at Bush’s side, but circumstances wreaked havoc with the concept of round- the-clock presidential grasp of the levers of power. For all his power and all the modern technology at his disposal, it is not evident that the President had much influence—if any—on the government’s reaction to the day’s events.
Accounts conflict mightily as to whether communications aboard Air Force One functioned well or appallingly badly. Bush spoke with Dick Cheney around the time of takeoff, but it is far from clear with whom, and how usefully, he spoke once the plane was airborne. In interviews conducted for the first anniversary of 9/11, chief of staff Andy Card repeatedly emphasized how efficiently the President had been able to communicate with the Vice President, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and the military.
Bush himself, though, said it proved difficult—time and again—to get through to Cheney. He recalled pounding his desk on the plane, shouting, “This is inexcusable! Get me the Vice President!” He “could not remain in contact with people,” he was to say, “because the phones on Air Force One were cutting in and out.” In Washington, senior
