WHEN THE PLANE passed by, the rumbling was loud enough to shake the scaffolding. Working on the 38th floor of a building under construction on East 77th Street, Joe Libretti, a 45-year-old ironworker, could tell immediately that there was something wrong. “It just missed the Empire State Building antenna,” he recalled. The plane streaked past and, as the construction crews watched in horror, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Like almost everyone that September morning, Libretti and his friends assumed they had witnessed a bizarre and terrible accident. They were debating whether to go downtown and offer to help, when an American Airlines flight passed them, even lower than the doomed plane that had just crashed. “I mean, we could see people in the window,” Libretti said.
By the time the second plane smashed into the South Tower, the men were already on the move. Just as police and firefighters from all over the city instinctively raced to the site of the disaster, the ironworkers knew that whatever was left in Lower Manhattan would require the services of men who knew how to cut their way through huge piles of metal beams. When Libretti got to his union office at 42nd Street, he would find 100 other men there waiting to be told how they could help.
Joe Firth, an official of the carpenter’s union, was going through paperwork at the union headquarters on September 11. Almost as soon as the plane hit, the phone began to ring from union members wanting to know what they should do. “A lot of guys headed down to Ground Zero spontaneously,” he said, remembering how his men had pushed through the tide of workers and residents fleeing the area. “I know a lot of people were leaving, but I know a lot of construction workers were heading the other way.”
By the time the towers collapsed, many of the people standing near the site, watching in horror, were carpenters and ironworkers and teamsters who had come to be of service. Dave O’Neal, 31, who had begun the day cutting structural steel on a project at Carnegie Hall, remembered later that as he stood watching the South Tower fall, the top floors seemed no more substantial than an egg, thrown down from a great height: “Everything just went flat.”
IN THE DAYS that followed, Americans tried to make sense of what had happened, through positive action. They raised money, gave blood, and—in thousands of cases—made their way to the site of the disaster and offered to search for survivors. Students at Oakwood College, a traditionally black school in Huntsville, Alabama, watched the towers fall on television, threw shovels and garbage bags into their bus, and drove directly to New York City. “We traveled about 24 hours to get here,” said Dr. Gregory Mims, their chaperone. Unable to gain entry at the site, the students—most of whom played in the school band and had had the foresight to pack their instruments—decided instead to show their solidarity with New Yorkers by marching through Manhattan, playing patriotic songs.1
Most of the volunteers had to be turned away. The pancaked towers formed an enormous, unsteady pile of twisted metal and concrete rubble, a threat to anyone who tried to maneuver around on it. Police checkpoints blocked access to anyone but emergency workers—mainly firefighters frantically searching for lost comrades. Men like Joe Libretti and Dave O’Neal were also eventually allowed inside because they had the skills to cut through the tons of mangled steel that was impeding the rescue efforts.
Libretti discovered that his 43-year-old brother, Daniel, a member of one of the Fire Department’s elite rescue units, was not on vacation, as he had originally believed. September 11 was Danny’s first day back on the job. As the ironworkers waited restlessly for the guards at the smoldering attack site to let them in, Libretti’s instinct to help became personal. He would search for his missing brother.
O’Neal, a volunteer fireman in his hometown in Pennsylvania, had many friends in the Fire Department, and ten of them were missing. “We tried looking for them but we couldn’t find them. We were finding body parts…. They were everywhere, everywhere you went.” The air smelled like sulfur, he thought. Strange flames were shooting out of the ground—“purples, greens, yellows.”
Some estimates would put the number of men and women who took part in the Ground Zero operations in the tens of thousands, including firefighters and police officers, as well as the volunteers who raced in to help during the chaos that immediately followed the attack and the mainly immigrant cleaning crews who would be called in at the end to prepare the commercial buildings and residences for reoccupation. The number included about 1,700 construction workers, and many of them remained at the site for months. They were primarily men who made midlevel pay building the city’s skyscrapers, men who kept their families in the faraway but affordable suburbs of upstate New York or Pennsylvania. Many had grown up in the same neighborhoods that filled the ranks of the city police and firefighters and had multiple connections to the departments. Some, like O’Neal, were volunteer firefighters themselves. Some, like Libretti, had close relatives who were among the missing. They would all risk their lives, stumbling through massive heaps of unstable rubble looking for bodies and clearing away evidence of the city’s wound. The work would be terrible, full of sights that would reappear in nightmares and waking trauma for years to come.
The word “hero” has been devalued since 9/11. But if all those who put themselves at risk to search for the living, then the dead, count as heroes, the construction workers were the ones who were unsung.
And in many cases, they would become the victims, too.
WHEN LIBRETTI AND his friends were allowed to enter Ground Zero, a cloud of dust and gases hung over the 16-acre World Trade Center site. Firefighters with dazed expressions wandered about. Fires burning everywhere sent clouds of smoke and foul fumes into the air. The shifting pile of debris, several stories high, threatened to swallow up rescue workers. Libretti hooked up with two firemen searching what was left of the South Tower. They played their lights on a twisted steel beam and discovered that the bodies of three people—two women and a man—had somehow become wrapped around the beam. Libretti and a firefighter tried to free the man by grabbing his arms, but the body fell apart.
“You couldn’t walk more than a few feet in some areas without encountering body parts,” he said.
As dawn broke, Libretti heard someone call his name, and he turned to see several firefighters from his brother’s rescue unit.
“Where’s Danny?” he asked. The men just hung their heads.
It was not until dusk on September 12 that Libretti realized he needed to go home, to get the medicine he took for diabetes. He drove two hours to the house in Pennsylvania, where he lived with his wife and three children. He showered, slept for a few hours, grabbed some clothes, and got back in the car. On the morning of September 13, the ironworker was back with the rescuers at Ground Zero. Like O’Neal, he would remain on the job for months, working around the fuming tower of rubble and sometimes sleeping in one of the tents that had been thrown up for workers across the street from the site.
THE MEN—AND a small number of women—who worked at the World Trade Center site were breathing in a toxic stew of smoke, carbon monoxide, pulverized cement, gypsum, PBCs, and other potentially lethal substances. The towers had turned into a mass of metal, dust, gas, fluids, and rubble that contained up to 1,000 tons of asbestos, along with an enormous amount of fiberglass. The estimated 50,000 personal computers the buildings had housed contained at least 200,000 pounds of lead; the light fixtures gave up lethal quantities of mercury; the burning oil from the tower that housed Rudy Giuliani’s smashed command center alone contributed more than 150,000 gallons of fuel. The oil fires released large amounts of benzene—exposure to which can lead to leukemia—while the burning plastic from furniture and carpeting and cable sent up plumes of smoke that laced the air with cancer-causing substances such as dioxins.2
It was hard to think about any of that while there was the possibility that people might be trapped beneath the smoldering rubble, praying to be rescued. The emergency services workers had always embraced an ethic of disregarding personal danger in order to save other people, and the construction workers on the site followed their lead.
On that first day, 17 people were pulled from the rubble—14 of them from one spot in the North Tower where a section of stairwell had remained intact. Everyone imagined that was just the beginning. When Pasquale Buzzelli, a Port Authority employee who had miraculously survived the collapse of the building with some cuts and a broken foot, was rescued and brought to the hospital emergency room several hours after the tower fell, the staff patched him up quickly and sent him home—certain that all their attention would soon be required by victims who were in far worse shape.3 But Buzzelli would turn out to be the second-to-last person to be taken out of the building alive. Genelle Guzman-McMillan, another Port Authority worker, was found on the second day, lying next to a dead fireman, her legs crushed and pinned under the debris. Hers would be the last desperate pounding, the last call for help, and the last good news to emerge from the pile.
Everyone who remained unaccounted for was dead. Neither the rescuers nor the relatives of those who were lost could accept that reality. Dr. William Trolan, a physician who came to New York as part of a team of veteran rescuers from California, was haunted by the knots of people who would stand behind rope lines set up by the police, pressing pictures of their relatives on the Ground Zero workers and crying, “Did you see him? Did you see him?” Some were crying. “You feel totally helpless,” he said. “You don’t want to tell these people there’s no hope.”
Harold Schapelhouman, who headed the California team, was struck by the pulverizing effect of the height of the towers, and the force of their collapse. “You didn’t even find pieces of broken glass,” he said. Schapelhouman had participated in rescue operations after the Oklahoma City bombing, where his team had found, if not living victims, at least intact bodies. In New York, he recalled, “we went through decontamination one night and one guy had a gold crown stuck in the sole of his shoe. I mean, that’s the degree of what we found.”
OF ALL THE could-have and should-have analyses of what happened in Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center towers fell, very few critics have faulted the city for failing to make the rescuers observe proper health and safety procedures on those first desperate days. No one would have listened, and if the rescuers had been reminded that they were risking their lives, they would have kept going anyway. No matter what protocols are put in place for homeland security, if another terrorist attack happens on American soil, people will rush in to try to save the victims, ignoring their own well-being and leaving officials to simply try to keep as much order as possible at the scene.
But as time elapses and rational hope fades, caution and care might be expected to replace panic and passion. Bruce Lippy, an industrial hygienist who studied health conditions at the site, said international protocols acknowledged that the chance of rescue exists for up to two weeks. At Ground Zero, the chances dimmed far quicker than that. “We expected transition to occur in an ordered, organized, planned and effective manner,” said Lippy. “It did not occur for several months.”
The only man who could have forced it to occur earlier was Rudy Giuliani. Not only did he alone have the legal authority to shift the operation from rescue to cleanup and recovery, his instant icon status and symbiotic identification with the firefighters gave him the moral authority to make it happen. Only he could have effectively put the health of the thousands at the pile ahead of the hunt for the remains of those already lost. Phil McArdle, the health and safety officer of the firefighters union, would later assess the long-term health effects of the months at Ground Zero, likening it to Agent Orange and Vietnam. “We’ve done a good job of taking care of the dead,” he said, “but such a terrible job of taking care of the living.”4
The mayor certainly knew about the dangers the polluted air posed to workers at the site. After the very first Giuliani cabinet meeting on the attack, Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen noted in his diary that “asbestos will be a problem” and that the men working at the core would need respirators. Von Essen soon got the “World Trade Center cough” himself, even though he only visited the site periodically and spent most of his day “hacking,” as he put it, at Giuliani’s side at the Pier 92 command center. While Von Essen’s cough went away after a few weeks, he said he was sure that “some” at the site would have “long-term lung problems.”
The mayor was also under no illusions about the chances of finding anyone alive after the first few days. “A collapse expert from FEMA had warned at an early staff meeting that it was a virtual certainty that no one had survived the titanic force of 1,300 feet compressing into a mere 80,” wrote Von Essen, acknowledging that they knew “the rescue was over.” The firefighters did not acknowledge that reality and would resist any change as a betrayal of their mission, but Von Essen understood that it had to happen and pushed Giuliani to do it again and again.
There should have been a point—perhaps as early as the end of the first week—at which Ground Zero was officially reclassified as a demolition, debris removal, recovery, and reconstruction site involving hazardous materials.5 The workers needed to be fitted for the proper equipment, told that they had to wear it at all times, and encouraged to pace their efforts to accommodate respirators and other bulky gear. They needed to be given regular medical checkups and forced to wash the dust off their bodies and change clothes before they went home and contaminated their families.
Von Essen wanted to admit publicly that the rescue operation was over. He planned to break the news to the families of the missing firefighters at a meeting on September 18. But as he was on the way to the podium, Giuliani grabbed his arm and whispered, “Don’t say it. They aren’t ready.” The fire commissioner noted in his diary on October 14—after particularly troubling incidents at the site—“mayor now seems ready for what I recommended two weeks ago…now we need to figure out how to do it.” In the end, there was never any official announcement. Instead, the operation continued 24/7—half cleanup, half-body-part-search, governed by its own rules rather than those required for a hazmat event. In late November, Giuliani got into a sharp exchange with a construction worker who called the mayor’s radio program to ask that the crews, who were working through Thanksgiving, be given Christmas day off to spend with their families. The mayor refused, because, he said, the families of the police and firefighters who died at the site “feel so strongly” that the recovery of the bodies had to keep going on around the clock.6 When city officials on site closed it for Veterans Day earlier that month, Giuliani deputies made it clear that they should not shut it down again.
A WEEK AFTER the attack, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—in a press release geared to reassure the public that Lower Manhattan’s air was safe—said that the highest levels of asbestos “have been detected within one-half block of ground zero where rescuers have been provided with protective equipment.” The notice drew a picture of a well-ordered area, with everyone assigned the level of precaution appropriate to his or her situation. That was far from reality. The air quality in residential and commercial neighborhoods that were being reopened was a mixed bag at best, and not all—or even most—of the people at Ground Zero were wearing protection. The failure to require the proper health and safety gear at the site was inexcusable, wrote Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai Hospital, and “the result will almost certainly be unnecessary disease and death.”7
Obviously, if the Giuliani administration had truly been worrying about and preparing for a terrorist attack in the years since the first World Trade Center bombing, the office of Emergency Management, the Fire Department, or other city departments would have had more and better equipment for this kind of emergency. But it hadn’t, and the only protection Libretti was offered in the early days at the site was a small dust mask that covered the nose and mouth. The masks were not intended for the kind of air the workers were breathing at Ground Zero, and they quickly got filthy and clogged by debris. Yet, according to the three doctors who ran the FDNY’s Health Services Bureau, 70 percent of the firefighters “had access to only a dust mask not approved for this type of exposure” on September 11. The same doctors said 82 percent of firefighters over the course of the early days were “without respiratory protection,” some eschewing the inadequate masks they were given.8
Phil McArdle and Uniformed Firefighters Association president Steve Cassidy wrote the Fire Department after 9/11 complaining that “for years” the department had “ignored many issues related to respiratory protection” and that “these lapses in responsibility” had a “detrimental effect on firefighters” at Ground Zero. The only type of protection addressed in the circulars sent to all units, the union letter contended, was the mask normally worn at fires—a bulky “self-contained breathing apparatus” with an oxygen tank that typically gave firefighters about 18 minutes of fresh air. The kind of long-term, air-purifying respirators needed at the site were rarely seen at the FDNY, the union leaders said. Most members hadn’t been “trained properly” in how to use them, nor had they been fitted for them—and if a respirator did not fit, it could be worse than useless. Better protective gear for protracted hazardous exposure had been one of the post-’93 bombing recommendations—generated by then chief of department, Anthony Fusco—but there had been little practical change in eight years.
The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety had 15 hygienists at the site on September 13, sampling the air and trying to determine the level of danger. Almost immediately everyone agreed that the workers should wear dual-cartridge air-purifying respirators that provided extended protection, covering their noses and the bottom half of their faces. The federal health experts from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other agencies threw themselves into the project, and the site was soon flooded with tens of thousands of these respirators, many arriving by the end of the first week. But some fit badly, and the men disliked putting them on. “The smoke was so intense that once you’re in that air, your mask would fill up with smoke. You’d have to take your mask off or otherwise you couldn’t breathe,” said Dave O’Neal.
McArdle and Cassidy, the firefighters union leaders, conceded that most of the respirators “went unused during the weeks of the initial operation,” and they blamed that on the failure of “supervisors and safety officers.” Von Essen’s diary for October 14 said almost the same thing after recounting incidents at the site: “Another glaring example of lack of discipline and leadership by some officers in command at the site…proper protective clothing, training, position, you name it.” The Fire Department doctors later wrote that only 30 percent of the firefighters “were able to wear the respirators most of the time,” describing them as “impossible to wear during prolonged work activities” because firefighters couldn’t talk to each other or exert themselves.
Harold Schapelhouman’s rescue team from California had been working at the site for days before they were instructed to insert a second cartridge into their respirators that would filter out dangerous chemicals.
“Usually you err on the side of safety and then you may decrease,” he said. His men, he recalled, asked each other, “What? How could this be?”
The workers who naturally preferred to believe they could work unencumbered got lots of reinforcement. “Supervisory personnel from many organizations on site regularly entered the restricted zone without respiratory protection, setting a terrible example for their workers,” wrote Bruce Lippy. “Political figures, dignitaries, and movie stars visiting the site had to be persistently hounded by safety professionals to even wear hardhats. Miss America participated in a photo opportunity inside the restricted zone, reportedly in heels…. Poor role models abounded.”9 The most important role model of all, of course, was Rudy Giuliani, who brought the biggest dignitaries on Ground Zero tours himself. And the mayor, of course, was never seen on television or in news photos wearing a respirator (although he did wear a face mask on occasion).
After the first few days, most people who walked around the periphery of the pile were breathing air that tests generally showed to be fairly safe. The greatest peril lay in the “green zone” where fires continued to burn below the surface, consuming plastics and oil and god knows what, and where workers continued to dig deeper into the ruins, raising new levels of dust. But all attempts to define exactly where the green zone began came to naught, and the plume of smoke from the pile continually shifted with the wind, contaminating the air in different sections of the work site. The difficulty in making sweeping judgments about which parts of the site were safe was illuminated when Juan Gonzalez reported in the Daily News that on some occasions in October, the EPA had measured levels of benzene—a known carcinogen—from 16 to 42 times higher than the permissible federal limit. An EPA spokeswoman agreed the readings were “high” in the area right around the still-burning fires, but noted that they dropped dramatically outside the plumes of smoke. Then she acknowledged that the winds sometimes brought the plumes right in the vicinity of the workers.10
In the midst of all this conflicting information, the workers seemed to hear only the reports that suggested they could continue the jobs they were bent on completing without the uncomfortable respirators. Hygienist Lippy said the construction workers he observed were so determined to be upbeat about the air that they frequently let their respirators dangle from their necks “like loose neckties,” with no supervisors taking notice. There were certainly plenty of reassuring reports to hear. “I’m not saying the EPA lied to us—I don’t know that,” said Schapelhouman. “I don’t know what the truth is. All I know is one thing: 70 percent of my people were sick when they came back, a number have continued to be sick over the years and there’s a big question mark in my mind.”
But it wasn’t just the EPA. The city health commissioner, Dr. Neal Cohen, said there were “no significant adverse health risks.” Joel Miele, the environmental commissioner, said “It’s not a health concern.” And Giuliani himself argued that the stench and air were “not health-threatening,” encouraging people to ignore what their own senses were telling them. “It may be uncomfortable and it may be offensive—and it is in many ways,” he told CNN, “but the reality is it’s not dangerous.”
It would have been an important signal if Giuliani, who was constantly surrounded by Von Essen, Police Commissioner Kerik, and OEM’s Sheirer at his daily televised briefings, had occasionally featured health experts to address the air quality issues and carefully differentiate between the pile, the neighborhood, and nearby areas. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group, called Giuliani’s frequent press statements “inspirational, comforting and universally welcomed,” but said they “fell short of the mark” when it came to communicating about health matters. The NRDC said the city “could have called upon independent medical experts based at the most prestigious hospitals and universities to help explain available data.” Instead, everyone from Henry Kissinger to Jesse Jackson showed up at Giuliani’s side at the press briefings, and the city failed to reach out to these experts.
It would have been just as important a signal for Giuliani to don a respirator when he actually went to the site, to show those closest to the pile that they should not feel they were being weak or malingerers if they wore the proper protection. But the mayor was interested in sending a different signal altogether: that Lower Manhattan was open for business and safe for both Wall Street workers and residents. That would certainly not have been reinforced by the sight of a huge contingent of workers clomping around Ground Zero in protective gear and respirators. (When EPA workers erected a huge tent where workers could wash off their boots and shower after a shift, one of them remembers being instructed not to call the area a “decontamination” station.)11 A volunteer who worked on the site and developed long-term respiratory problems remembered hearing the mayor assure the public that the air downtown was safe. “When you have someone of the caliber of Mayor Giuliani saying it, they took that as gospel,” he said.
About a week after the attack, Giuliani’s health commissioner, Cohen, told reporters that the city would put more safety officials at the site to make sure searchers wore the proper equipment. But as late as October 5—24 days after the attack—EPA chief Bruce Sprague sent a letter to a Cohen deputy deriding the city’s “very inconsistent compliance with our recommendations,” listing the lack of respiratory protection and personnel wash stations. Sprague wrote the letter after raising the subject of respirator noncompliance in a couple of conversations with a city health official. “It’s almost common sense,” Sprague said in a subsequent court deposition, “that one does not stick their head over a barbecue grill for hours and hours and then expect there not to be some sort of an issue.” Though Sprague pushed the health commissioner to issue an order requiring respirator use, it wasn’t done. (When EPA Administrator Christie Whitman saw Ground Zero footage on CNN late one night, she was alarmed by the sight of workers laboring without respirators, and started making midnight calls to emergency officials to try to shake things up.12) Since the EPA did not have the authority to enforce safety policies for anyone except its own employees, Sprague urged the city to have the incident commander adopt and enforce a safety plan. The commander at the time was the highest-ranking fire chief on site. Later in October, the top officials of the city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) were named coincident commander with the fire department. But Giuliani himself was always regarded as the incident commander by the federal agencies that deferred to him. And Mike Burton, the executive deputy commissioner of DDC who actually supervised the demolition and cleanup, testified later that “ultimately the mayor gets the responsibility for what happened down there.” Burton said “everything was coordinated” through his boss Holden, “deputy mayors and the mayor.”
Though the construction giant Bechtel was hired by the city as its health and safety consultant, no one paid attention to its late September initial recommendation that the number of entry/exit points onto the site be drastically reduced from 20 or so to 2. That was Bechtel’s way of forcing workers to be fitted for respirators when they arrived and decontaminated when they left. Incredibly, Bechtel didn’t announce a comprehensive health and safety plan until October 29. Soon after, it left the site altogether, replaced by another vendor with another approach.
NEW YORK CITY is in many ways a nation-state. It is so vast and—by American standards—so old, that it has, over time, come to assume responsibilities for many functions that other cities have never thought of doing for themselves. “None of us wondered, ‘Should we contact the state? Should we contact the feds? FEMA? The Army Corps?’ It was just ‘We’ve got a disaster here. Let’s fix it.’ It was instinctive,” said Ken Holden, the commissioner at DDC, which put itself in charge of clearing the site. The DDC did an excellent job with many of the responsibilities it assumed, but Holden regarded the respirator issue as largely beyond his control, particularly in the case of firefighters and police officers who would only take orders from their own brass.
Ground Zero had been divided into four segments, each assigned to a different construction company. Holden’s staff gave the contractors guidelines about where the workers should take precautions against possibly toxic air, and the contractors were expected to follow through. But the incentives went in the other direction. The contractors were being pressed to complete the work quickly and were promised by the city that they would be indemnified against any legal claims from workers who felt their health had been harmed at the site. While the extraordinary crisis may have justified this extraordinary exemption, it also meant that the contractors had no financial incentive—as they ordinarily do at a job site—to protect workers. So, on October 15, even as the city was publicly rejecting any suggestion of a health threat at the site, its top lawyers prepared a letter recommending indemnification for the contractors. Signed by Holden, the letter said that the city and the contractors would “be open to exposure years after the Project is completed based on hazardous materials claims.” It predicted that the claims could be so substantial they could “bankrupt” the city or the companies.
The Giuliani administration was also aggressively pursuing federal legislation to limit the city’s liability. As early as October 4, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi had issued a report on the impact of 9/11 on the city’s budget and cited its potential liability for workers’ respiratory illnesses. Even as every public pronouncement from the mayor and his men was filled with reassurance, an internal memo to Deputy Mayor Robert Harding reported that the Law Department was estimating that there were 35,000 potential 9/11 plaintiffs against the city. Two of the prime potential claims cited in the memo—just weeks into the cleanup—were that rescue workers had been “provided with faulty equipment or no equipment (i.e., respirators)” and that Ground Zero was an “unsafe workplace” under various federal safety and labor laws. The memo urged the city to push Congress to create a fund to cover the city’s liability similar to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund it had just created for the airline industry.13 On November 1, Giuliani wrote a letter to Congress supporting an amendment to the Victim Compensation Fund legislation that would extend its benefits to those working at the site, as well as fix a $350 million cap on city liability. In late November, an amendment passed achieving both purposes. Those who could make a provable case of injury at the site were added to the list of eligible fund recipients, if they, like the families of the dead, surrendered their right to sue.
For all the tragedy the terrorists had created in Lower Manhattan, everyone involved with the recovery was aware that things could have been far worse. There were no “dirty” bombs on the planes and therefore no radiation. The huge tanks of Freon stored below the towers for air-conditioning did not explode. And the so-called “bathtub”—a massive concrete wall that surrounded the World Trade Center’s seven-story basement and prevented the complex from being inundated by the Hudson River—did not rupture. After the towers collapsed, support for some parts of the wall was provided only by the tons of debris that had fallen into the basement. Careless removal of the debris could have caused part of the wall to collapse inward and, in the worst-case scenario, send in torrents of gushing water that would have drowned the workers in the basement, flooding the railroad tunnels, the subway system, and even part of the city.
Strangely, the mayor paid no attention to the bathtub crisis, according to Holden, who appeared twice a day at the command center for cabinet meetings early on, but was eventually excused from all but occasional meetings. “Daily meetings were held with Commissioner Kerik and Von Essen, not really with me,” he said. The mayor never spoke to him individually about any site issues, nor was he even told about the EPA letter to the health department that complained about the lack of wash stations and protective gear.
“We would have loved to have had the authority to throw out people who would not wear protective equipment,” recalled Holden, adding that at one point he told his top aide, “If rates of use don’t improve, I will shut the site completely.” Asked if either Giuliani or the deputy mayor who oversaw his agency ever “showed any interest in the exposure of the workers” to Ground Zero health hazards, Holden said: “Not that I recall. Not specifically concerning the wearing of respirators.” Holden pressed, like Von Essen, to reduce the number of firefighters on the site, but Giuliani rebuffed his efforts as well. Instead, the mayor was “mostly interested in reports on the tons of debris and steel that were shipped out and the bodies that were found,” says Holden. Giuliani wanted “numbers and results, not what type of work, problems and risks were behind those numbers.” Holden’s deputy Burton knew Von Essen very well and sent digital photos of firefighters without respirators to him in an effort, as Burton later testified, “to try to up the utilization rate.” But Burton’s memos, phone conversations and photos provoked no discernible Fire Department action.
The mayor’s single-minded focus was on getting the cleanup done. He told the city that Ground Zero would be cleared in 180 days, a deadline in search of a reason. The sense of rush meant that even after any chance of rescue was over, there was not so much as a discussion about reorganizing the cleanup around sounder health and safety standards. “Giuliani wanted us to clean it up quickly,” said Holden. “The sooner the better. He did not want to leave a visible sign of the city’s open wound.” But it was not as if the mayor was the only one who was hell-bent to get the job done, and Holden said he did not feel he was being directly pressured to hurry. “It was the spirit of what was happening,” he said. “We started at 24/7 when there was an emergency, and we kept on going after that.”
In retrospect, the rush—and the lack of concern for the workers’ health and safety that went with it—seems manic, an emotional stampede. The people involved at the time may have felt they needed to close what Holden called an open wound. But five years later, the most contaminated office tower near the site, the Deutsche Bank building, was still awaiting demolition and Ground Zero remained a vacant construction site, the planned Freedom Tower still a mirage. A brief hiatus, or the rapid introduction of the rules suggested by Bechtel, or any form of respirator enforcement with penalties, could have made all the difference. It would have temporarily slowed the firefighter-driven search for body parts, but spared the health of so many of the searchers. Adjusting the search and the cleanup to the reality of the fire—which kept burning and spewing toxins until late December—would have saved lives, and prevented disabling illness. Alternative ways of putting out what became the longest-burning commercial fire in history, such as foam and nitrogen, could have ended the toxic smoke sooner. But they were rejected—in part due to concerns about disturbing the buried human remains.
The mayor did express interest in construction safety issues. He told Holden that he did not want one more death at the site and, remarkably, no one was killed during the entire rescue, recovery, and cleanup effort, although some of the workers did suffer serious injuries. That was no small feat. The site was unpredictably dangerous. Lippy, whose union members operated the very large machines atop the rubble, summed up the hazards with one worker’s alarming saga—he’d gone off for coffee only to discover, when he returned, that his vehicle had literally been swallowed up by the pile.
THE DAYS BLED into one another. Workers came and workers went, but some, like Libretti and O’Neal, found it impossible to leave. Every body part discovered, they felt, meant a possible sense of closure for a grieving family somewhere. Every ton of rubble carted away was a little act of defiance toward the terrorists. One of the ironworkers, Libretti remembered, hurt his leg but refused to leave the site to get it checked. He continued working for a week before they discovered it was broken.
Years after the disaster, Libretti was still haunted by the things he had seen at Ground Zero. A sight or a smell, like a rotting piece of roadkill on the highway, would trigger a flashback. And in the dark, there were the nightmares. “I’ll go to sleep and I’ll toss and turn until I do fall asleep and then I’ll wake up because I’ll smell rotten flesh. It’s like I’m right there. Or I’ll just get a flash of when we picked a guy out of the elevator—he was burnt to a crisp. Or the mush that I fell in, which happened to be a pile of skin. And every time I don’t shave and let my beard grow right here, right where my chin was in the mush, I now get a rash.”
In the wake of the disaster, there were many programs set up to help firefighters, police, residents of Lower Manhattan, schoolchildren, or anyone else traumatized that day to recover their mental equilibrium. There was less discussion of the mental health of workers charged with cleaning up the site. A screening program set up to evaluate the health of rescue and recovery workers found long-term rates of post-traumatic stress, panic, and anxiety that were much higher than in the general population. “Construction workers are a particularly vulnerable population,” said Lippy. “They don’t talk about what they’ve seen, they want to tough it out, which is the wrong way to go with the kind of horrors they experienced.”
And as the weeks and months wore on, they also didn’t talk much about how hard it was to breathe. Neither the work culture of the site, which had been established in those early desperate days, nor the experience of the workers—who generally worked on construction projects that offered no air hazards—encouraged the men to protect themselves. Even when federal agencies finally assumed a more active role, the intervention was too mild to get their attention. As much as city officials later tried to blame the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for the lack of respirator use, they acknowledged in court testimony that OSHA agreed in September to act merely as an adviser. Finally, on November 20, 2001, OSHA signed an agreement with the city and the contractors, explicitly yielding its power to issue fines for health and safety violations in return for a promise from the contractors to respond to requests from OSHA compliance officers. This memo of understanding obviously left those compliance officers rather toothless when it came to enforcing their concerns. There is some evidence the deal actually worked on some levels, such as limiting accidents. But it did not improve the shocking infrequency of respirator use.
Once the debris had been taken off the site—an operation that always entailed raising dust from new layers of as-yet unexplored wreckage—it was carted off to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, where everything was carefully examined for additional body parts. Lippy observed that although the debris was wetted down to protect the workers at the second site from dust, almost all of them wore respirators. “Why could we get 90 percent respirator compliance at Fresh Kills and only 30 percent at Ground Zero?” he asked.14
But the same disconnect was apparent at the site itself. Dave O’Neal remembers watching the safety monitors and thinking they looked like beekeepers in “those white outfits, with tanks all hooked up to them.” They were walking around like the actors in a bioterrorism movie, covered head to toe. The rescue workers, meanwhile, were wearing their regular clothes, with no protection at all: “We’re taking our shirts off, we’re sweating our asses off. We’re trying to get these [body] parts out to get these people closure at home.”
When O’Neal pointed all this out to a firefighter friend who was working on the site, the officer said fatalistically that the people who said the area was safe had undoubtedly been wrong or lying. “But what are we gonna do? We’ve already been exposed. You know there’s nothing you can do to change it.”
On September 27, O’Neal says, he coughed up some blood and was sent to an on-site medical facility. “It was like a little hospital inside, but it was a trailer. And this guy came up to me and said you just got a little irritation in your throat, it’s just from the dust. You’ll be fine. Wear this mask, take this medicine. It was Robitussin.”
One night, when Libretti and some other workers were sitting by a crane eating chicken and Jell-O in the middle of the myriad health hazards triggered by the destruction of towers full of asbestos, computers, oil, and other environmental gremlins, a supervisor came up and shined a flashlight at them. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“We’re having dinner,” they told him.
“You can’t eat out here,” said the horrified newcomer.
“We’ve been doing it for a month,” one of the men said.
VON ESSEN WAS concerned by what he saw at the site. “Though many workers had come down with the World Trade Center cough, many still refused to wear their masks and respirators,” he wrote in his autobiography. “People walked around without hard hats and safety glasses.” And he, too, noted the way workers were casually eating at the pile “without even washing their hands.” But any attempt to enforce more discipline would have had to include a reduction in the number of firefighters and police who were on the site, something Giuliani resisted.
The Fire Department, Police Department, and Port Authority Police were each permitted to have 75 people on the site at all times, looking for remains of the victims. It was, to the participants, a holy mission. But the Ground Zero workers—particularly the firefighters—went at it with a kind of zealous abandon. They often refused to wear any kind of protective gear that would slow down their search, putting themselves in peril. On October 31, Giuliani finally announced that the number of workers would be scaled back to a third of the former level. As everyone had feared, the change precipitated an emotional, somewhat violent protest from the firefighters. On November 2, several hundred off-duty firefighters marched on Ground Zero to demand that the search for bodies continue as before. “Bring our brothers home!” they cried. When the police attempted to stop them from entering the site, fighting broke out and five officers were injured. Twelve protesters were arrested. The demonstrators marched on to City Hall, chanting “Rudy must go!”
The mayor’s wrath was first directed not at the firefighters but at a group of ironworkers who were filmed mugging for the cameras and waving an American flag. Giuliani called Ken Holden and demanded that he fire the offending ironworkers. Holden, who recalls it as the only time Giuliani ever called him during the cleanup, managed to avoid taking any action, heading off what would certainly have been a dangerous collision between the mayor and the proud, exhausted construction workers. Eventually, the fire unions apologized to the police and the mayor dropped the charges against all but one of the demonstrators and returned the size of the firefighters’ search teams to previous levels.15
The mayor insisted he had made the important point. “This is all about safety,” he said. “We don’t want any more casualties. We don’t want any serious injuries. This is a very dangerous operation. We have to make sure everybody’s wearing equipment, everybody’s being careful, and everything’s being done in a coordinated way.”
For many of the workers, it was too little, too late. It also didn’t last too long. Within nine days, the mayor approved more firefighters at the site than had been there when the Halloween plan was announced.
It was around the same time that Libretti remembers finally being fitted for a respirator. “And from that point on everybody had to wear masks on the site. But by that point, everyone in the crew I had worked with had gotten sick. One after another. Got the runs, coughing. It just ran through us. Everybody had it.”
IN MARCH, ABOUT half a year after the towers fell, the pile of rubble had become much more like a normal construction site. Dave O’Neal was handed “a regular plain piece of paper, and it said well, if you ain’t wearing your mask, it’s a $3,000 fine. If you’re not wearing your goggles, it’s a $1,000 fine.” He had been working at the site for months. The man who gave him the notice, O’Neal said, told him that 7 World Trade Center, where he had worked, “had transformers that were burning that is totally toxic to your health, that can give you cancer and everything else. And I says: ‘Well, why didn’t they tell us that when we were there? Maybe that’s the reason why I was getting dizzy. Ninety percent of the time I was getting migraines.’ And they said: ‘Well, then we didn’t know.’”
On March 5, 2002, O’Neal was working a midnight-to-noon shift, burning steel, “and I was coughing a lot, real hard, like I had laryngitis and I couldn’t speak and I was getting pounding migraines.” A friend brought him some Tylenol from the medical facility for the headache, and O’Neal suddenly felt nauseous.
He moved away from the work area and vomited up blood.
“Something’s definitely wrong,” he told himself.
Covered with blood and weak-limbed, O’Neal suddenly had a vision of himself collapsing and being mistaken for one of the World Trade Center corpses. He asked a friend to walk him to the medical facility, to make sure that if he fainted, someone would revive him and carry him to safety. As soon as he walked into the makeshift clinic, he was dispatched to a hospital emergency room.
As O’Neal remembers it, after he was examined, a doctor came and said, “I have bad news.”
“What do you mean, bad news?” O’Neal asked.
“You have some kind of lung disease,” the doctor said. “How old are you?”
O’Neal was 31.
“Both of your lungs are black,” the doctor said. “You’ll have to have surgery.”
The doctor’s prediction turned out to be more than right. O’Neal wound up undergoing multiple surgeries and enduring bouts of pneumonia that left him totally disabled. He suffers from a nervous condition that leaves him shaking as if he had Parkinson’s disease. His younger daughter, who was a baby at the time of the World Trade Center attack, also suffers from chronic illness, and O’Neal worried that it might have come from dust on the clothes he wore when he returned from the site. His wife, who has back problems as the result of an auto accident, cannot work. The family lives on workers’ compensation and Social Security disability payments, but neither his wife nor his daughters have health coverage.
At the time of the attack, O’Neal was a lean, 160-pound young man, but the medications, which include steroids, and the lack of activity due to his lung problems caused him to balloon to nearly 300 pounds. The men he keeps in touch with from his days at Ground Zero also report a wide range of problems. “My friend Billy, he’s got lung disease. Joe, he’s got lung disease and 20 other health issues. His teeth are falling out from being down there.” And O’Neal still has nightmares. “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night sweating. I’ll hear voices. I’ll hear cranes moving. The sounds of metal and screeching.”
THE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS who had labored at Ground Zero had every reason to be proud of what they had achieved. Although the city’s real estate interests had always complained about the trouble they had handling the unionized workers on their projects, the teamsters, ironworkers, carpenters, and other skilled workers at Ground Zero exhibited a dedication and work ethic as intense as those of the firefighters. Under conditions of great hardship and real danger, they had pulled 1.5 million tons of steel, concrete, and other rubble from the site of the disaster. The work did not end until May 30, 2002, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided over a modest ceremony, watching the last load of steel from the South Tower being removed from what by then looked in many ways like an enormous, but otherwise unexceptional, construction site.
Observing his fellow members of the carpenters union, Joe Firth felt that men who had been held together by the shared sense of mission at the site tended to fall apart once their services were no longer needed. “A lot of guys, after it was all over, they felt like they’d lost a part of themselves. I think that’s when the reality set in of what we’d gone through,” he said. For some time after he left Ground Zero, Firth found himself breaking down whenever he drove across the George Washington Bridge. “I remember coming across and seeing the smoke and I’d get flashbacks…of the first body I’d found,” he said.
Ground Zero follows everyone who worked there. “They tell you in EMT school never to look into the eyes of somebody who’s dead because they kind of haunt you. On that particular day it was a lot of eyes looking at you, no matter which way you turned,” said John Graham, an emergency medical technician.16 But the burden lies far more heavily on some than on others, both mentally and physically. Some combination of luck and genes causes respiratory disease to pass over one individual and come crashing down on another. “I’ve seen two guys work side by side and get the same exposure and 15 years later, one’s got crippling scarring in his lungs and the other’s barely affected,” said Dr. Stephen Levin of Mount Sinai Medical Center, an expert on the effects of asbestos on construction workers.17 Levin told a congressional subcommittee that Mount Sinai “saw people being taken off the pile within the first couple of days, gasping for breath, choking, and could predict at that time that there would be a great deal of potential long-term effects with respiratory problems.”
Three years after the terrorist attack, Mount Sinai released a report on a screening program involving more than 1,000 people who had worked or volunteered at Ground Zero. Nearly half had “new and persistent respiratory problems,” such as coughing, shortness of breath, hoarseness, ear pain, or nosebleeds, said the Centers for Disease Control, which funded the program. More than half had persistent psychological problems, including panic attacks and flashbacks. The percentages roughly held when the clinic had finished examining nearly 15,000 workers. In the final six months of 2005, Mount Sinai treated 841 Ground Zero veterans, and an astounding 67 percent of them were laborers or construction workers, with 85 percent having “upper airway illnesses.”
About 10,000 people who worked in or around the site have applied for workers’ compensation, claiming they had been left unable to work. That did not include the firefighters, about 320 of whom retired because of breathing problems. At the end of 2005, more than 400 others were on restricted light duty or not working at all because of 9/11-related health problems. Dr. David Prezant, codirector of the Fire Department’s World Trade Center medical program, tested 13,000 firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and paramedics and found that after 9/11 their average breathing capacity dropped more than 12 times what it would have during the normal aging process.
Harold Schapelhouman’s rescue team split up when it returned to California, the men returning to their jobs in 16 different agencies around the state. It was not until they held a reunion barbecue that he realized something was wrong. Although the turnout was good, a lot of the absentees had been unable to come because of illness. “We had a percentage in there of people who were sick—and not just a little sick. A number of those guys had pneumonia. They were younger, very strong, viable guys who normally you wouldn’t anticipate that would happen to.” One of them, Dr. Trolan, has had three cases of pneumonia since 9/11—“always in the same spot.” In 2005, his physical showed he had restrictive airway disease that had been growing progressively worse over the last three years.
The starkest evidence of the damage done, however, comes from a source close to the mayor. Ken Feinberg, the special master who ran the Victim Compensation Fund, has been a Giuliani friend since the ’70s and was selected for the post in part on his recommendation. Feinberg awarded over a billion dollars in compensation to 2,680 claimants with physical injuries, after painstaking reviews of their individual applications. Uniformed fire, police, Port Authority, and emergency medical service workers collected 70 percent of the total, with 1,388 firefighters receiving $626 million. Only 103 construction workers won compensation, tallying $32 million. Unsurprisingly, nearly 55 percent of the award was for respiratory injury, with another 27 percent for multiple injuries, including respiratory. The average award was for nearly $400,000. While workers were supposed to seek medical treatment within 72 hours of the attack to qualify for an award, Feinberg was empowered under the regulations to grant waivers. His final report indicated that he’d done that for “hundreds of rescue workers who were diagnosed with demonstrable and documented respiratory injuries directly related to their rescue service.”18
A city attorney says the Feinberg awards reduced the number of Ground Zero claimants against the city by over 1,200. Nevertheless, by 2006, 492 rescue workers, including many construction workers, were still suing.19 The city filed a motion before U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein to dismiss the cases, and more than four years after the attack, both sides were still submitting papers. In an earlier attempt to sue federal EPA and OSHA officials, which Hellerstein dismissed, the judge praised the people who risked their lives and health at the site, but added that the fact that some of them wound up suffering terribly “doesn’t mean there’s a remedy.” David Worby, one of the lawyers in the city cases, has brought a class action suit on behalf of 7,300 people. Worby claims that 23 to 40 people have already died as a direct result of their labor at Ground Zero, and the media has begun to take note of the stories his clients stepped forward to tell about their compromised health, their ruined careers, and their lost husbands, sons, and fathers.
JOE LIBRETTI IS sitting in a house in Pennsylvania, fighting chronic lung disease and depression. He worries about his family, medical expenses, and hanging onto his home. “I can’t run up the stairs. I can’t carry anything heavy,” he said. Always a physically active man, he gained weight from inactivity. He did not qualify for workers’ compensation benefits until the end of 2005. “I’ve used up money I put away. I used up my annuity. My wife worries about everything,” he said.
No one intended that any of the workers who spent months in one of the most physically unpleasant, emotionally traumatic, and potentially dangerous sites the country has ever seen, striving to recover bodies and restore a sense of safety and normality, would be left to suffer from the health consequences without adequate compensation. Yet, for many, that seems to be what is happening. Of the more than 8,000 people who filed claims for workers’ compensation with the state of New York, citing injury or exposure to toxic air from Ground Zero, nearly a third were challenged. The workers’ compensation system and the federal Feinberg program are based on the presumption that injuries at Ground Zero would become quickly apparent. But often, they didn’t. Some workers were later able to get waivers and join the Feinberg program after their symptoms did begin to show up, but others couldn’t.
Sometimes, the tough men who were the backbone of the recovery effort resisted acknowledging their disabilities. “A lot of those guys didn’t want to do the medicals, because they didn’t want to get medicalled out,” said Harold Schapelhouman, meaning they didn’t want to wind up out of work indefinitely. Libretti, for example, continued to work for well over a year after he left Lower Manhattan, struggling through increasingly serious symptoms and ignoring his friends’ and relatives’ pleas that he confront his condition. When he finally applied for workers’ compensation, the construction company he worked for at the World Trade Center site challenged his claim, arguing that his illness could have been the result of jobs he had worked on since.
No one knows how many sick World Trade Center workers failed to apply for benefits at all or dropped out of the compensation process in frustration. For a long while, a worker who inhaled toxic air on September 29 had to go to a different court than one who inhaled it on September 30, due to a complex judicial ruling. “I’ve got patients who really should have stopped working but they’re hanging in there,” Dr. Levin told the New York Times. “Many of them say they simply are not going to get into a system that puts them through such hassles, even if we advise them to do it for their own protection.”20
One particularly tragic story was documented by Ridgely Ochs, a staff writer for Newsday. Timothy Keller, a city emergency medical worker, drove his ambulance to the World Trade Center in time to be caught in the middle of the chaos when the South Tower collapsed. For months afterward, he returned to the site after his regular work shift to help in the search for bodies. About a year after the attack, his friends noticed that Keller had begun to have trouble breathing. “He would walk two blocks and have to stop. Then that shortened to where he could walk a block and have to stop, and then he could only walk a couple of feet,” his 19-year-old son, David, said. But Keller resisted any idea of disability until the spring of 2004, when people began complaining that he was unable to do his job. By then, he had missed the two-year deadline to file for a September 11 injury. His application for workers’ compensation, which had to be approved by the city, was rejected under the theory that there was no connection between his job and his illness. His appeal was still working its way through the system when he died in June of 2005, almost penniless.21
Early in 2006, James Zadroga, a 34-year-old New York City police detective, became the first city police officer to die as a direct result of exposure to Ground Zero air. His parents said he was diagnosed with black lung disease, mercury in his brain, and pulverized glass in his body. Tests showed he had the lungs of an 80-year-old man. The family tragedy was compounded when Zadroga’s young wife, Ronda, died of a heart ailment while he was bedridden and tethered to an oxygen tank. His parents are now raising their granddaughter, Tylerann, who was four when she was orphaned. While everyone presumed that the police and firefighters who came to harm during the rescue efforts were well looked after, Zadroga’s parents said the Police Department resisted acknowledging that his labored breathing and persistent cough were job-related and that he was forced to keep reporting for work long after he was too sick to do the job. “I can’t pay my bills and work doesn’t want to acknowledge that I’m sick, depressed and disgusted,” the detective wrote during his last illness. “…They remember the dead but don’t want to acknowledge the sick who are living.” The NYPD, which would not comment on the Zadroga’s charges, said that the department now has a policy allowing officers who had worked more than 40 hours at Ground Zero to qualify for disability pension. That law was not on the books when Zadroga, who had worked more than 450 hours at the disaster site, fell ill.
DAVE O’NEAL DOESN’T like television. “I’ll just sit there in total silence and do nothing,” he says. He has plenty of time to contemplate whether there was a better way to handle the work at Ground Zero. “I think that what they should have done was close down the Ground Zero area for a week, have environmental protection come in and figure out exactly what kind of equipment they were going to need, which I know the government has plenty of money to spend on. And get in touch with Washington and tell them the stuff that we needed to use down there to get the job done properly…Whether it took two or three years to do the job…it didn’t matter. But to have the right equipment, every once in a while send us the right filters and stuff like that.”