‘I thought it would be an easy push’: 9/11 first responders, sick from Ground Zero, are still fighting for federal support 25 years later

Several first responders from 9/11 are still fighting on Capitol Hill to ensure funding for a program that covers the costs of cancers and other illnesses tied to the toxins at Ground Zero, they told Heartlander News.

Twenty-five years ago, 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four planes and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans. Since then, exposure to the toxins at Ground Zero has killed more than 9,000 people, according to multiple reports.

More than 4,200 FDNY members alone are certified as having cancer through the WTC Health Program, according to the city’s World Trade Center 25-Year Health Impact Report, released Sept. 1 by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore. About 1,000 of those members have had more than one type of cancer, the report states.

The first responders, many of whom are associated with the Fealgood Foundation, told Heartlander News they’ve been shocked by the hypocrisy of lawmakers while fighting for health care as they’ve battled aggressive cancers and attended funerals of their close friends. The foundation advocates for sick and injured first responders and 9/11 survivors. It was founded by John Feal – a demolition supervisor at the Ground Zero cleanup site whose foot was crushed by a steel beam.

Tom Wilson, a New York Police Department (NYPD) sergeant on 9/11, has visited the halls of Congress more than 60 times since he connected with Feal in 2009. Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in 2008.

“On 9/11, every Congressperson would send out a tweet, a Facebook, whatever it was, saying, ‘Never forget our veterans, never forget our 9/11 responders,’” Wilson told Heartlander News.

“And now we’re walking the halls of Congress, trying to get basic health care. … I thought it would be an easy push. I didn’t think we’d have to fight for it, but I was very wrong about that.”

Only a New York issue?

Wilson said many lawmakers outside the New York area initially dismissed the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program as a regional matter rather than a national one.

The program provides monitoring and treatment to those directly impacted by the attacks in New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where an airliner crashed into a field. It was established as a federal program in 2010, helped along by Feal’s advocacy.

“They think, ‘Oh, well, that’s a New York issue,’” Wilson said. “No, it’s not. First of all, it was an attack on America… There were people from all over the country, actually all over the world, who responded down to Ground Zero in some fashion.”

Wilson has been certified through the World Trade Center Health Program for cancer, asthma and other conditions he attributes to carcinogens at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills Landfill, where he sorted through debris for evidence and human remains. Wilson said that though he was instructed to search for wedding rings or other signs of missing persons, he never found anything – a fact that still haunts him.

“I deal with the long-term effects of head and neck radiation,” Wilson said. “I had my neck dissected, half my tongue cut out… had my neck done a second time to remove 39 lymph nodes, and then I had jaw surgery back in 2018 because the radiation damaged my jaw.”

New York City released approximately 170,000 pages of records showing city officials may have known more than they let on about the toxic air quality at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks, according to the mayor’s office. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the release Tuesday, settling multiyear lawsuits brought by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch.

A spokesperson for then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended the authorities’ handling of the Ground Zero air quality warnings, saying they acted on the best information available at the time.

Gary Smiley, a New York Fire Department (FDNY) paramedic on 9/11 who now sits on the World Trade Center Medical Advisory Steering Committee, said Mamdani’s release was a welcome step, but that he hopes it leads to a conversation about pension rights and widows’ rights.

“I literally had them ask [the city] a couple months ago for a gentleman’s hospice records, and I was like, ‘For what? Did you want to see how much he suffered?’ I don’t understand,” Smiley said. “Twenty-five years later, nobody wants to fix that part of New York City, and it’s sad. I wish the new mayor would. I would love to speak to him about it, but I haven’t had the opportunity. Maybe now that he released the air monitoring records, which hasn’t been done before, maybe he’ll understand … and he would like to sit and have a talk about the pension board with me. I would welcome it. I would pay for lunch.”

Incomprehensible damage

Smiley said he’s fared better than many of his colleagues.

“I’m very fortunate because one in four first responders have cancer,” Smiley said. “So to not be that one in four, you’re very lucky.”

Smiley recalled the horror of the attacks’ early moments. “We were standing in line waiting for an assignment, and we watched people jump out of the building,” he said. “I watched. I counted 37 people jump.”

He was blown down the street and pinned beneath an ambulance when the North Tower collapsed, which he believes saved his life by shielding him from falling debris.

Glenn Tarquinio, an NYPD officer who worked at Ground Zero, said the devastation of the site itself was near-incomprehensible.

“I did not see one file cabinet, one computer, one desk, one chair, one typewriter,” Tarquinio said. “They were just completely crushed, completely pulverized into dust.”

He also described the victims’ family members who gathered near the site in the weeks after the attacks, handing out flyers to the FDNY and the NYPD.

“Please, if you see my son, if you see my daughter-in-law…” Tarquinio recalled them saying. “I could never not take one of these flyers. I would fold it in fours and put it in my shirt pocket… For years, I had these photos. I could never actually bring myself to throw them away.”

Tarquinio said he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in January 2020 – 19 years after 9/11 – only for his surgery to be postponed indefinitely when COVID-19 struck weeks later. He eventually had four surgeries and was declared cancer-free in July 2021.

Fighting for others

Ivonne Sanchez, who worked in FDNY EMS at the time, developed breast cancer despite no family history of the disease and no genetic markers on a BRCA test. She credited her health insurance through the fire department with saving her life.

“If it wasn’t for the fire department, my health insurance… I don’t know if I’d be here to speak about it,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said she continues advocating on behalf of the volunteers and first responders she says are not so fortunate to have access to the support she did.

“I told John, ‘Put me in because I have a story to tell,’” Sanchez said. “Every time I spoke to a politician, I said, ‘You know, the unsung hero is not us. We got paid to do our job. We swore to protect and serve this city,’” Sanchez said. “Red Cross, all those volunteers – they are the unsung heroes, and this is why I’m fighting for them. I am their voice.”

Twenty-five years later, the first responders said what they hope people remember most are the heroes who rushed to the scene on 9/11 and the unity in America following the attacks.

“They didn’t want to die for this, but they did, and it affected so many lives in so many different ways. … They shouldn’t be forgotten because their lives were cut short,” Tarquinio said. He noted that he often thinks of Linda Ellis’s poem The Dash, which is about the small mark on a tombstone between a birth date and death date that stands in for a person’s whole life.

“Everything about that person’s life, in that person’s life … everything you remember about them is encompassed in that small dash, and you know we all have our dash,” Tarquinio said.

Smiley told Heartlander News that “the country came together as one and really helped heal each other, and didn’t worry whether you were Democrat or Republican or you were brown or blue or green … that you were an American or a human. … That’s what they should remember. That we had a world that was very together for a little while, and it really needs to go back to that.”

(Featured image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Fealgood Foundation)