The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - Jim Dwyer - NYTimes.com

Remembering 9/11 is something I would rather not do, rather not recall my first vision - smoke just beginning to rise from the second tower to meet that of the first, the shock when the south tower collapsed, the realization of awful incalculable loss, the futility and loss of the rescuers, walking past firehouses displaying the names and photos of the men lost. Hard to know how to remember it when misguided revenge inflicted such suffering in Iraq, satisfied with the execution of Osama Bin Laden, the day is almost past. But as so often for me a writer with an Irishman's ear strikes the note I long for. - GWC

The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - NYTimes.com:
by Jim Dwyer

William Butler Yeats wrote of an earlier, bloody era in "Meditations in Time of Civil War.”
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love

At vast cost in human capital, we carved 9/11 into the history of loss in other places, the enmities of a decade rising from the horrors of the day. But the majesty of that day does not belong to the chronicles of war. It lives in truths the size of atoms, nearly invisible and — one hopes — indestructible.

That morning, Raffaele Cava, age 80, was working on the 90th floor of the north tower. After the plane hit, no one could open the exits, so he went to another office and sat with Dianne DeFontes and Tirsa Moya. The hall floors were melting. Suddenly, two men in the stairwell pried open the door, walked in and ordered everyone to go. They were Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz, Port Authority employees who worked one flight down, and who took it on themselves to climb up and down 14 floors, getting scores of people out. They never left.
Tirsa Moya walked Raffaele Cava down all 90 floors.

You could ask no more of human beings.

'via Blog this'

Jon Stewart’s Advocacy Role in 9/11 Bill Passage - NYTimes.com

Jon Stewart with 9/11 responders

Bill Carter and Brian Stelter in the Times ask:

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

Jon Stewart’s Advocacy Role in 9/11 Bill Passage - NYTimes.com

This is no time for modesty.

You heard it HERE first. On February 4, 2010 I wrote:

Jon Stewart is becoming Edward R. Murrow: the most serious independent television journalist of the moment.  He is armed with a comic persona, razor sharp wit, and the analytic skills of a top flight political commentator.  

If the PBS News Hour wants to come out of its torpor they should replace Mark Shields with Jon Stewart, and David Brooks with Andrew Sullivan.

Ground Zero respiratory claims: Lung Function After Seven Years

Graph above: Abnormal Lung Function in Firefighters and Emergency-Medical-Services (EMS) Personnel Who Had Never Lung Function in Firefighters and Emergency-Medical-Services (EMS) Personnel Who Had Never Smoked and Who Worked at the World Trade Center Site during the First 2 Weeks after 9/11


Three years ago in Will the Post 9/11 World be a Post-Tort World? I wrote:

At the site of the attacks in New York enormous effort followed— first in the nearly fruitless search for survivors, then for the recovery of remains of the dead, and finally in removal of the debris of the fallen towers. In the wake of the catastrophe came labor, dust, and disease.  We are witnessing the unfolding of an epidemic of industrial disease that evokes the historical epidemics of silicosis, asbestosis, and cancer.

Today we are learning of the epidemic of industrial illness at Ground Zero from Dr. Irving Selikoff’s successor at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Dr. Philip Landrigan informed us in 2002 that the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was not only the worst assault on the American homeland in the 225-year history of the United States:

"It was also the most massive acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City. The destruction of the twin towers released thousands of tons of toxic materials into the air of lower Manhattan—asbestos, particulate matter, lead, soot, PCBs, and dioxins. Workers and children were the groups at greatest risk of exposure."  Philip J. Landrigan, Lessons Learned: Worker Health and Safety Since September 11, 2001, 42 AMERICAN J. IND.MED. 530-31 (2002)

 It was possible then to hope that the early results would not predict the long term.  But today we have learned the sad news - from the WTC Medical Monitoring Program of the New York City Fire Department - that the researchers and health care personnel at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have concluded:

Exposure to World Trade Center dust led to large declines in FEV1 for FDNY rescue workers during the first year. Overall, these declines were persistent, without recovery over the next 6 years, leaving a substantial proportion of workers with abnormal lung function.

FEV1 - forced expiratory volume at 1 Second - is a key measure of lung function.  The news is disheartening.   Aldrich, et al., Lung Function in Rescue Workers at the World Trade Center After 7 Years, New England Journal of Medicine, April 8, 2010 vol. 362 no. 14.


We can only hope that Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who has labored heroically on the World Trade Center catastrophe litigation, will soon complete the work of cobbling together a settlement that recognizes the wrongfulness of the conduct of the City of New York which slighted workers health and safety as it urged them on as heroes engaged in the grim efforts to rescue the few survivors and to put out the fires which smoldered at the sit of the fallen towers.

We Are All New Yorkers Now

Eight years ago, 7 days after the catastrophe we now call 9/11 I wrote this essay. It was accepted by my fellow members of the editorial board of New Jersey Lawyer, the New Jersey State Bar Association's weekly newspaper.

New Jersey Lawyer Weekly

September 24, 2001

10 NJL 1814

Editorial

We Are All New Yorkers Now

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and America combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

- Abraham Lincoln (1838)

At these points now do we expect the approach of danger: when a tourist visa is granted, when a man named Mohammed boards a plane, when a flight takes off from Newark bound for San Francisco, when we enter the elevator and push the button for the 44th floor, when your train stops in the tunnel, when the cell phone rings.

On The Day After, New Yorkers woke to a silent city. Dawn normally brings traffic helicopters and the background hum from the highways. On The Day After, New York was patrolled by military helicopters. An aircraft carrier was posted off the white sand beaches of Jones Beach State Park. “Tasked to provide air defense for New York”, said the NORAD commander. Air Defense? For New York? At the gateways to New York Harbor - the Throgs Neck, George Washington, and Verrazano bridges Coast Guard cutters on picket duty barred civilian traffic. No fuel, no stone, no freight, no fishermen’s skiffs could pass. No cars entered Manhattan. Traffic at mid-day was lighter than Sunday morning 7 AM.

The glistening symbol of the City is gone. A thick plume of smoke rose for days, marking the spot where thousands of the fallen towers’ workers were buried. With each wind shift another boro felt the sting of the acrid smoke. A day of mourning stretched into weeks still without end. The burials that may never come still lie dreadfully before us.

First came the offers of blood for the wounded - who never got to the hospital. Then came the firefighters, EMT’s, and construction workers from Ohio, from Tennessee, from New Jersey and Massachusetts to clear the rubble and honor the dead. Soon we saw flags fluttering from car antennas and hung from balconies and fences.

They came because New Yorkers were killed by planes filled with hostages bound from Boston for LA, because the captors incinerated other Americans along with their unmourned selves as American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon. They came for those who struggled with the attackers and crashed in a field in Somerset, Pennsylvania. They came because the distinction between combatants and non-combatants has been erased. We are all New Yorkers now because we are all Americans, and because we are all combatants now - and do not know the face of the enemy.