Today was certainly a day for remembrance. It was the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy and the television was filled with shows about the day. I’ve seen a lot of these shows but there was one I had seen before that I didn’t notice in today’s schedule.
Almost 3,000 people died 10 years ago, and we certainly need to remember them and their families, but there’s another group that needs to be remembered today as well – the surviving first responders and volunteers.
Sometime after 9/11, I saw a show about the first responders that survived and how many have suffered catastrophic health problems, probably due to what was in the air on 9/11 when they responded.
If you watched any of the shows today reliving the events of 9/11, you no doubt saw the huge dust clouds that covered the city after each tower fell. At the time, few probably stopped to think what all was in those dust clouds. Dave Newman, an industrial hygienist for the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health estimates that the dust contained hundreds, maybe even thousands of chemical substances.
Chairman for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Philip Landrigan called the clouds “nasty stuff” and said, “Two thirds of the mass was pulverized concrete. That was very, very caustic. It had a pH of 10 or 11, which is why the stuff burned people’s eyes and noses and respiratory tracts and the esophagus.”
When you watch shows, you notice people covering their mouths with anything they could fine. Some first responders had the surgical masks and others wore respiratory masks to keep the debris out. Yet, many had no protection for a number of reasons. Some probably were so wrapped up in trying to rescue people, they simply didn’t think about themselves. In the show I watched, some said the real masks hampered their rescue efforts. And, there probably just wasn’t enough protection to go around, considering the massive amount of first responders and volunteers that showed up on the scene.
While civilians that day were exposed to the dust, it was for a minimal amount of time. However, first responders and volunteers were not only exposed to the dust on 9/11, but for days afterward, digging through the dust looking for survivors.
Landrigan and colleagues at Mount Sinai studied 27,000 people that responded to the NYC 9/11 tragedy. Of that 27,000, 43 percent were determined to have some type of lung damage, 42 percent have sinusitis, and 39 percent have GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease).
In January of this year, President Obama signed the Zadroga bill, which will allot $4.3 billion to help those responders and volunteers suffering from their 9/11 efforts.