18 years after 9/11, former students are feeling health effects, but full consequences remain unknown
Lila Nordstrom was a senior at storied Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan when"we saw a huge fireball engulf the first tower" of the World Trade Center back in 2001.They’re two of the thousands of children who were at school in lower Manhattan on the day of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, many of whom are now grappling with the fact that they may face life-long, potentially fatal diseases as a result of their proximity to ground zero, much like the first responders.
"After the second tower was hit, [the firefighters who were gearing up] started to tell me messages to give their loved ones," he said."It was a lot of different people and a lot of different names and a lot of different messages and of course, being four, it was hard to account for all of them." Peters says he evacuated the scene with his mom when the towers started to collapse, running north through the dust cloud.
The students returned to their school, a public high school regularly ranked among the best in the country, just weeks later on Oct. 9, 2001. Education Week reported at the time that the school system worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and city health and environmental officials to conduct the tests. On top of that, former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said at the time that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe, a comment she apologized for, although she said they did the best they could at the time with the information they had.
Miranda Barbot, the deputy press secretary for the New York City Department of Education, shared a statement with ABC News about the testing that was done before the students returned to lower Manhattan. "They wanted to reopen Wall Street and they wanted to send a message to our enemies that ‘New Yorkers are resilient and you can’t stop us,’ but boy are we paying the price for that mistake today," Barasch said.
Of the program's 269 certified cases for people under 35, 194 have aerodigestive conditions, 126 have mental health issues and 28 have cancer, all 1% or less of the total, the data shows. The WTCHP provides screening and healthcare to survivors and responders.
Dr. Jacqueline Moline is the director of the Northwell Health Queens World Trade Center Health Program and said that part of the problem in the immediate aftermath was that regulators were testing for certain compounds and not others. In her written testimony to Congress in June during the effort to reauthorize the Victim Compensation Fund, Moline warned that various respiratory diseases in addition to cancers like"leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma" were found in responders, survivors and school children, and"it is expected that more of these cancers will continue to occur in the future."
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