25 Years After 9/11 Attacks, New Yorkers Still Struggle With Exposure to Toxins

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, many New York City residents are still grappling with complicated health conditions related to exposure to the toxic air and debris around ground zero.

“We were digging through the pile and using rakes to spread out all the debris to look for anyone’s remains,” says retired New York City firefighter Brenda Berkman. “We were working alongside really heavy equipment, as time went on, that picked up big loads of debris and dumped it, creating a cloud. This went on for 10 months. And at first, there was no proper decontamination at all.”

“EMS personnel were told, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be getting sick. You’re not a firefighter. So don’t worry. Just go back to work,’” says retired New York City EMT Marianne Pizzitola. “Moving into the years right after, … we started to find consistent diagnoses at our retiree meetings.”

Author and public health advocate Lila Nordstrom recounts how students at her school, Stuyvesant High School, located just three blocks away from ground zero, were also misled by officials after the attacks.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by a roundtable of guests in our New York studio and beyond.

Bob Hennelly, award-winning investigative journalist, broadcast and print reporter for more than 40 years, general manager of WBAI Pacifica Radio here in New York, host of What’s Going On! Labor Monday, he broadcast live during the 9/11 attacks a quarter of a century ago and has been covering the 9/11 developments since then.

Lila Nordstrom is with us. She was a high school student at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11, the closest school to the World Trade Center. She’s a writer, a public health advocate, founder of the advocacy group StuyHealth, author of the memoir Some Kids Left Behind: An Activist’s Account of Beating Bureaucracy and Building a Movement, which came out in paperback last week.

Marianne Pizzitola is with us, retired EMT, emergency medical technician, for the New York City Fire Department. After the 9/11 attacks, she founded FDNY EMS Retirees Association, has since founded and is president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees association.

Sara Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. She’s now serving her fourth term in that role. She’s been a union flight attendant since she was hired by United Airlines in 1996, now representing 55,000 aviation first responders from 20 airlines.

And we’re joined by Captain Brenda Berkman, a retired firefighter here in New York City. Brenda is the vice president of Monumental Women.

And, Brenda, we’re going to begin with you. Talk about what you were doing 25 years ago, what you understood to be the case in safety for the firefighters, and for you, as a firefighting woman, what that has meant. Who has been left out from being cared for today, 25 years later?

BRENDA BERKMAN: Well, good morning, Amy and Juan, and thank you very much for having us on here today. Excuse me.

Yeah, so, on 9/11, I was off duty, but I responded off duty to the World Trade Center, and I had a group of my own off-duty firefighters with me. It’s a long story. We got there right as the second tower, the north tower, collapsed. So, the air was completely full of dust and debris. And because we were off duty, we came down there without any protective equipment, no respiratory protection, no radios to communicate with, really no real tools. And we were — you know, we had to do what firefighters do — namely, look for anyone who might still be alive in the pile of rubble, and stretch hoses to put out the the fires, get water out of the Hudson because the water mains in Lower Manhattan had been disrupted when the towers fell down. It was really complete — a disaster beyond what anyone could possibly had imagined. But in those early days, we did what we had to do despite the lack of protective equipment, because we believed people to still be alive, and we wanted to get to them.

But as time went on and we realized that no one could still be alive, we went into a recovery effort, and that meant we were looking for remains. And people may not recall, but we were digging through the pile and using rakes to spread out all the debris to look for anyone’s remains. We were working alongside, you know, really heavy equipment, as time went on, that picked up big loads of debris and dumped it, you know, creating a cloud. This went on for 10 months.

And at first, there was no proper decontamination at all. We were walking around with this dust really all over the city, back to our homes. And for instance, in the case of my fire truck, which we were able to start using again after we got some of the dust out of the engine, was never properly decontaminated for 18 months. So, that meant that every time we turned on the AC or the heat system or changed a headlight, poof, dust blew out on us. So, this went on.

But the point I want to really make, and the other panel members are really going to be able to expand on this, is that because there was a relatively small number of women first responders — so, in the New York City Fire Department, only about 25 women were in the fire department, in the firehouses, out of 11,500 firefighters at the time of 9/11. And half of us were down there on the day of 9/11 and got exposed to all of those toxins that day, but also many, many days thereafter for the next 10 months. And in the police, it was slightly higher. In EMS, it was higher.

But the point being that people don’t understand that not every medical condition is covered by the medical monitoring program. And indeed, for the civilian people who are just now finding out that they should be part of the medical monitoring program, civilian people have to show a condition before they can start to be monitored, which means they could already have come down with cancer in an advanced stage before they exhibit symptoms or whatever. So, women’s cancers have been left out of the equation for being covered under the medical monitoring program, because the government was arguing that they didn’t have the proper statistical comparisons. And Lila has talked about this — I’m sure Marianne has also talked about this, and Bob knows — that, you know, they weren’t — there’s certain women’s conditions that have never been properly studied, so they don’t even know what the — you know, how many women come down with this stuff in the general population, so they don’t have anything to compare it with.

I mean, it’s really — I commend the mayor for releasing the documents that he has released. I hope that the city continues to do this going forward, that they release all of the documents, that we have full transparency, so we can know. We have no idea how many people, how many women especially, have died from 9/11-related conditions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring Lila Nordstrom into the conversation. Lila, you were a student at Stuyvesant High School at the time. I remember, when I was covering the subsequent events after 9/11, talking often with Marilena Christodoulou, who at the time was the head of the Parents’ Association at Stuyvesant and who was fighting constantly to get the city to be clear about what the dangers were for the students who were brought back into Stuyvesant about, I think it was, a month after the attack. Could you talk to us about your experiences?

LILA NORDSTROM: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, so often when people want to hear the story, they want to hear the story of the day itself, which was certainly traumatic. But I think the story of Stuyvesant really most begins on October 9th, which is the day that we came back to our original building three blocks from the World Trade Center.

Marilena Christodoulou had already been engaged in a long conversation, as had the rest of the Parents’ Association, with the Department of Education about the safety of the building, and numerous false assurances were made about the condition that we would find the building in. And that included that, you know, they claimed that they had done a very deep cleaning, that there had been HEPA filters installed, and, you know, that students would find that the building was sort of decontaminated.

And when we got back, it was clear that that was not the case. We went through five police checkpoints on our way into the building on the first day. So, you know, we were essentially being paraded in front of television cameras as part of the messaging efforts to show that downtown was safe. But as soon as we got into the building, not only did we find that there were no HEPA filters and the building had never really been adequately cleaned, but also the school itself was located next to the barge that they were bringing all of the debris from the site to. So, that meant that the building was being recontaminated on a daily basis every day for months and months, not to mention the fact that fires burned at the site until, I think, the end of January. Other schools in the area pushed back their returns based on the experience that we were having at Stuyvesant. And they didn’t do a full cleaning of the building until the next summer.

AMY GOODMAN: And what grade were you in?

LILA NORDSTROM: I was a senior.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’ve ended up writing a book, what happened to the Stuy students, to the Stuyvesant students. Again, Stuyvesant High School was on the Hudson River.

LILA NORDSTROM: Yeah, and one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I wanted not only there to be an accounting of the story, because it felt like the national narrative had really excluded survivors from the conversation, but I also wanted there to be a story of the advocacy efforts and the fact that we were involved in the subsequent advocacy efforts that secured the Zadroga Act on three different occasions. I think there’s a perception that, you know, that was a story that only involved first responders and that the community really didn’t play a role in that process. But the community, which includes 300,000 people that were downtown, played a role in that process, has access to those programs in a different way than responders, but was an important part of that advocacy effort, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the students, and even faculty, that became sick? I think one teacher at Stuyvesant immediately requested a transfer as a result of his illnesses immediately after getting back into the school.

LILA NORDSTROM: Yeah, he was actually my math teacher, and I — it led to, well, really the end of my experience as a math student, because things fell apart from there. But there were a lot of reports early on of, you know, respiratory conditions, nosebleeds, headaches and that sort of thing. The New York Times reported that the lines for the nurse’s office were stretching around the school in the immediate months after 9/11. But we were told, “Oh, those will only be temporary. There will be no long-term health consequences.” And I think, you know, as we all know, that didn’t turn out to be the case.

I started StuyHealth in 2006 as a lifelong asthmatic who had just been diagnosed with GERD. I was finding it difficult to afford treatment for just those simple chronic conditions. And then a classmate of mine came forward and said, “Well, I just got diagnosed with lymphoma. Could that be related?” And we started to hear from other classmates that some of those earlier cancers that have shorter latency periods were starting to appear in the student population at Stuyvesant. Obviously, now we’re seeing cancers that have slightly longer latency periods. We’re seeing things like breast cancers and other sort of like more common cancers that strike people in middle age, because we’re now middle-aged.

AMY GOODMAN: Marianne Pizzitola, you are a retired emergency medical technician now, with the New York City Fire Department. You founded FDNY EMS Retirees Association and are president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. Can you explain what happened then and the medical services that are offered and not offered?

MARIANNE PIZZITOLA: So, we’ve found — it’s very similar to Lila’s story — that illnesses weren’t getting covered. Initially, EMS personnel were told, “Oh, you couldn’t be getting sick. You’re not a firefighter. So don’t worry. Just go back to work. It’ll be OK.” But as Brenda said, we had the same experience as she did, as we would get into our ambulances, and dust would come out of the vents. And we had to fight for the healthcare that we had. I ended up founding the first organization, FDNY EMS Retirees, in order to get healthcare equality, just initial, baseline healthcare for EMS workers. And we had to fight for that.

And moving into the years right after, as we started to find consistent diagnoses at our retiree meetings, people were telling us, “I have autoimmune disorders.” This is going back as 2004. So, we were trying to raise the red flags of things that we were seeing as a pattern. And my very first spreadsheets of tracking male, female, age, location of zone, diagnoses, we brought that to the FDNY, and they thought we were crazy. And it wasn’t until I reached out to a doctor, who I’ve since lost touch with — her name was Dr. Jean Pfau, out of Libby, Montana — and I said, “We’re seeing cancers. We’re seeing asbestosis. We’re seeing mesotheliomas. We’re seeing very unusual autoimmune disorders even in men that are typically found in women or people of color.”

AMY GOODMAN: Why is Libby significant?

MARIANNE PIZZITOLA: Libby is a sick town. Libby, Montana, mines are the vermiculite mines. That is a sick town from the contamination, environmental contamination. So, the doctor said to me, “I was waiting for someone to contact me.” And I was like, “No, you don’t understand. I am like just an EMT. I am not like some big managerial person to expose this. I am telling you I’m doing this as a grassroots style because no one’s listening to me.” And I ended up putting her in touch with Mount Sinai and the fire department. Mount Sinai was the only group that started to speak with her.

And over the years, we kept pushing for this. Mental health, autoimmune disorders — which I am a sufferer from, which is still not covered — cardiac illnesses, cognitive impairments, these are all things that we have been fighting for to get covered. And civilians have to go through that same fight. This just doesn’t make any sense.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to a break. We’ve been talking with Marianne Pizzitola, who is a former EMT with the fire department; with Captain Brenda Berkman, also with the fire department. We’ve also been talking with Lila Nordstrom, a former Stuyvesant High School student. When we come back, Bob Hennelly joins us, general manager of WBAI, has reported on this issue for years, and Sara Nelson, union chief, represents the fire — the flight attendants. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Combing the Ruins.”