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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. We begin today with a moment of radio silence joining for just a few seconds the ceremony at the World Trade Center, honoring those killed on September 11th, 2001, 22 years ago today with the ritual readings of their names plus several specific moments of silence including at 9:59, which is now. Let's listen in for that minute.

[background noise]

Brian Lehrer: The sound you're hearing is the waterfall in the World Trade Center Memorial.

Speaker 3: Gilbert Franco Granados. Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas and her unborn child. Elvira Granitto. Winston Arthur Grant.

Brian Lehrer: Now they've resumed the reading of the names. There are six moments of silence at the annual 9/11 ceremony punctuating the reading of the names of those killed on that day. The first moment of silence came at 8:46 AM, the time when the first hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower of the Trade Center, another at 9:03 AM when the second plane hit the South Tower. Another moment of silence took place at 9:37, the minute when a third hijacked plane struck the Pentagon, then the one we just heard at 9:59 when the South Tower collapsed from the impact and the fire it had caused.

Then there's the one coming up in one minute from now which we will also join at 10:02 when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after a struggle between suicide hijackers on that plane and passengers who bravely tried to retake control, but unfortunately and tragically in vain. There'll be a sixth and final moment of silence at 10:29, which we will also join, commemorating when the North Tower fell.

Now, the number of people counted as having been killed in those attacks is 2,977 innocent victims plus 19 hijackers over the four airplanes who died by the murder-suicides they committed for a total of 2,996 people lost and so many families impacted forever in just those few hours. Now let's join the Ground Zero ceremony for the 10:02 moment of silence as they finish reading this block of names.

Speaker 3: And my grandfather, firefighter Robert James Crawford. Being your granddaughter is something I will always be so grateful for and a title I'm blessed to have. I'm so proud to be part of you and to be able to carry you with me wherever I go. Our hero, we love you to the moon and back. Keep watching over us. We know you're always close.

[applause]

Speaker 3: Eileen Marsha Greenstein.

Speaker 4: Elizabeth Martin Gregg.

Speaker 3: Denise Marie Gregory.

Speaker 4: Donald H. Gregory.

Speaker 3: Florence Moran Gregory.

Speaker 4: Pedro Grehan.

Speaker 3: John Michael Griffin.

Speaker 4: Tawanna Sherry Griffin.

[bell ringing]

[pause 00:04:25]

Speaker 3: Joan Donna Griffith.

Speaker 4: Warren Grifka.

Speaker 3: Ramon B. Grijalvo.

Brian Lehrer: The 10:02 moment of silence at the World Trade Center site recognizing the lives lost when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after having been hijacked by 9/11 attackers. We will spend the first part of our program today acknowledging and discussing another hard and very current truth about the 9/11 attacks that in terms of premature deaths and quality of life, the attacks continue to have a very long tail.

Here is one sobering statistic announced by the New York City Fire Department just last week. We've long known that 343 firefighters were killed on 9/11 as they tried to rescue people from the Trade Center and put out the fires, 343 firefighters in about a half hour's time as the two towers collapsed. The fire department says, as of last week, another 341 firefighters who worked around the scene at the time have now died from 9/11-related diseases. That's just the firefighters.

If just under 3,000 people died immediately in the attacks, it's estimated now that more than 5,000 people who lived, worked, or attended school in the immediate area have died from illnesses related to the exposures that continued long after the towers fell. Maybe their names should be added to the annual Ground Zero ceremonies, but we will at least talk about them now and crucially about the tens of thousands more people still alive today with 9/11-related health conditions or who still might develop them.

There's a gender issue there too, with much of the medical research and rule-setting for benefits having been done with men like most of those firefighters in mind, so we'll talk now about the medical issues involved and the government programs that everyone should know still exist to help pay for medical bills and otherwise compensate today's survivor victims, including a new bill that Governor Hochul is signing today.

With me now is Dr. Michael Crane, medical director of the World Trade Center Health Program and the Selikoff Centers for Occupational Health at Mount Sinai Hospital. He's been very involved in all of this. Dr. Crane, we really appreciate your time with everything else I know you're doing on this September 11th. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Michael Crane: Thank you very much, Mr. Lehrer. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Would you like to start by talking about your center's work at Mount Sinai and who you've been treating, for what kinds of things up to and including today?

Dr. Michael Crane: Sure. The World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai is a responder center. It takes care of the workers who were on the site. The clinic, the Selikoff Clinic, at which those folks come, has a really long and distinguished history of taking care of workers.

I'm sure that the name Irving Selikoff is familiar to you. He was a great researcher who essentially showed that asbestos is the dangerous material that it has turned out to be. His work alone has probably saved thousands of lives around the world, so Sinai has a great tradition here.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. He is a giant in the public health community for people who don't know the name Selikoff. Go ahead.

Dr. Michael Crane: Yes, absolutely. I came to Sinai in 2006. My World Trade experience was-- at the time, I was the medical director of Con Edison and we had thousands of guys down there to go to do the rescue and recovery. A couple of things became immediately apparent, and this has been documented again and again by Dave Prezant over at the fire department, he's the medical director there, the terrible coughing, the bronchial irritation, the sinus irritation, the stomach irritation. All of these things were basically apparent almost from day one.

The additional thing, Mr. Lehrer, that I think can't be forgotten was the tremendous psychological impact of all of this, the post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and subsequently, for many people to cope, substance abuse that came about as a result of this terrible, terrible exposure. I can recall talking to Con Ed guys who had very good respiratory protection equipment, really good masks, and extra filters to keep the particles away from the face and the mouth, and down there they would have the mask on, the filters would become clogged, they would have to change them to do their work.

They would just have to keep going often without that respiratory protection because they just burned through it. It was hell on earth, Mr. Lehrer, and I think everybody who is associated with New York at all acknowledges that now.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Listeners, we can take some phone calls on this September 11th on the topic of people who've gotten sick or even who were just exposed to toxic debris from the 9/11 attacks in the months that followed. Do you have a story you want to tell or a question you want to ask of Dr. Michael Crane from the World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai? Or someone you would like to remember by saying their name out loud on the radio who died, not in the attack itself but subsequently from diseases related to exposures? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Feel free to call up and tell your story. Remember a loved one or ask a question. 212-433-9692. You can also tweet @BrianLehrer or send a text to our same phone number as our call-in number. Dr. Crane, some of those numbers I gave in the intro, do you track those? If we say 2,996 people, just under 3000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, how many would you now say have died since of diseases from post-attack exposures?

Dr. Michael Crane: I think that's an excellent question. As we've learned, unfortunately, over the years, reports from coroners, death reports are not always accurate, so we don't always get the exact number. I think the posting that is done at the World Trade Center site on the CDC, and they have a whole thing about the current responders and the age of distribution responders, they note over 6,300 people who they see as having passed away from the original responders and survivors.

Brian Lehrer: That would be more than twice as many people by now as those who died in the initial attack. Any rough number of people still alive who currently have 9/11-related illnesses?

Dr. Michael Crane: I can speak easily about the responders since I work with a lot of them. This is pretty amazing. We estimated-- I think you were here, Mr. Lehrer, in the city, right? During the attacks, you were already part of a news organization.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, yes, I was six blocks away. We saw and heard them out our office windows. We were evacuated the whole thing.

Dr. Michael Crane: Right. Your colleagues, you came down to the site also, and maybe you came down to the site. This is all very familiar to you.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't, but it's worth paying tribute one more time to those reporters in the WNYC newsroom, Beth Fertig, Marianne McCune, some of the others who, while the rest of us were being evacuated to NPR studios in Midtown Manhattan to go back on the air and anchor the coverage, they were running toward the scene of the attacks and reported from there, so yes, we will never forget the valor of those in the WNYC newsroom.

Dr. Michael Crane: That is the definition of heroism. Absolutely. We're looking at the responder numbers. We track now almost 85,000 responders all total. We think the estimate at the time and I can recall these being batted around because no one had a really sure total, but the estimate was around 90,000. At least it looks as though we have some ascertainment of at least a large number of the total responders who were on site, which is something that reassures me that we are actually seeing what's going on in that population.

That is one little good bit of news that does exist about the World Trade Center responders and the health program. I think the ascertainment, finding them, and having them come to us has worked pretty well. It has not worked so well over on the non-responder side, on the residents, on the students, on the people who worked in the community. I think the estimate for that population down there at the time of 9/11 was about 400,000.

Again, that statistic is a little rusty for me. I haven't looked [unintelligible 00:15:09], but about 400,000 people in that immediate disaster area. The survivor program is in total, I'm looking here, and again, these are not the numbers I work with every day, but about 38,000. Only about 10% or so of that population seems to have gotten enrolled into the program that was designed to take care of them.

I think that's long been a gap that we really struggle figuring out how to help on the responder side. It's not really our daily bread, but we also wonder how we could best get folks who were in that population to come in and be seen and sign up. That's why I am very grateful to programs like yours, and today, I'm happy to participate even as a person who's relatively ignorant about getting folks to participate in that survivor program. Really, really important.

Brian Lehrer: A listener texts. "I had lived downtown for 24 years. A few blocks from the towers and--" Sorry, another text just came in and blocked that one from my sight. I'm going to come back to that and follow up on what you just said. I mentioned the gender issue in the intro. Maybe you saw an op-ed in The Washington Post last week by Jessica Petrow-Cohen, who was five years old and living in the area on 9/11/2001.

Her family stayed and continued to live there, partly she says because it was a gay-friendly neighborhood, and it was a two-mommy household. Both her moms wound up getting cancer at the same time. She writes that women and children exposed to 9/11 toxins have been significantly understudied, and as a result, women with things like autoimmune diseases, which are more common among women, are being denied 9/11 health benefits due to a lack of data, she asserts. I'm curious, as a doctor and researcher, what's your view of that issue?

Dr. Michael Crane: I have to start with the caveat that I didn't get to read the article, and it sounds like I really missed a great one, so I'm going to go look it up after we talk here. I think she has some excellent points. To start with the more academic side, there is a specialty known as occupational and environmental medicine. It's just like internal medicine or endocrinology.

You study cases and you read literature, and you write and do research about occupational exposure. My forebear Dr. Selikoff was an exemplar for that. What happens though is that people write scientific papers that create the literature that can create the knowledge base. Well, in occupational medicine, if you were studying a chemical produced in a factory, in the past, most of those workers were male.

The fact of the population that was exposed being a male population created what is definitely a bias in the literature because they didn't always see female workers exposed to the chemicals, and therefore, they didn't feel they could make conclusions. Now, our friend Selikoff was an exception to that because he studied shipyard workers. He found one day that the guys were not changing their clothes and going home from the shipyards, and the wives were taking the laundry there and shaking it out and asbestos all over the place, and some of them actually got sick and died from the cancer called mesothelioma.

That was characteristic of asbestos exposure. We can't say that we haven't been warned, Mr. Lehrer. We have not been able to fill in that data blank sufficiently. I think this very astute writer/journalist really has a point there.

Brian Lehrer: Here's that text that I was looking for. This says, "I had lived downtown for 24 years, nine blocks from the towers. I heard the first plane before it struck. My wife developed a related life-threatening cancer a few years later. We got great help from Victim's Compensation. We survived, but life will never be the same."

Someone else texts, "I would like to acknowledge the loss in the work of the fire department personnel. I would also like to point out that many, many police officers were also present. My husband spent six weeks in what was called the hole. In the beginning, they did not have enough face masks, so he gave his mask to a buddy who had asthma. He is currently being treated for skin cancer on his face."

Someone else texts, "I'd like to remember police officers, Angelo Peluso and Martin Tom, coworkers who died from 9/11-related cancers." Let's take a phone call. Tessa, in Lower Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tessa.

Tessa: Hi. I wanted to acknowledge all of the people who worked in the parks in Battery Park City, where I was director of the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy. They were first responders. That day they all stayed at work, and we evacuated 50,000 people over the esplanade into the boats that miraculously showed up. They then started to clean and we had to remove feet of dust and debris from several of the parks. Not all of them, fortunately, because we were attempting to bring the communities back after 9/11.

One of the groups that I think is often forgotten also are the sanitation workers who every day picked up the dust and debris that we collected and are rarely discussed but were heroes. They were as well. We lost a [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Tessa, thank you so much for mentioning the sanitation workers, the parks conservancy workers, and the others, and of course, we all hear the emotion in your voice. Christopher in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Christopher.

Christopher: Hello gentlemen. Good morning. I just wanted to acknowledge the gravity of this day and thank you for the program, Brian, and your guest. I was a volunteer down at World Trade and I lived blocks away. I was there that day and all the rest, but I have subsequently succumbed to a lot of skin cancer issues that I've had surgically treated. To your guest's point, there was a point in my life where I was sliding into substance abuse from that day even and I was not even chronic with that.

As I'm going through therapy and looking at things and trying to understand trigger points and all the rest, it's very clear and it's clinically clear that it was so impactful that it affected my life even to this day. But there is that WTC Health Program, the Victim's Compensation Fund, and all the rest, which is somewhat complicated, but if you can navigate that, there is support and there is help out there. I don't want to take up too much time, but I encourage people to check that out because the doctors there are great and the program's great. Just have patience. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Christopher, thank you very much. In fact, Dr. Crane, I was going to ask you anyway if you can tell our listeners in a short version how they can sign up still for the Victim's Compensation Fund or the Zadroga Health Benefits Fund. You don't even have to be sick yet, just have been in the area at a certain period of time in order to register, right?

Dr. Michael Crane: Absolutely right. Years ago, if I had said this, people would say, "What's a website?" but now everyone knows what a website is, and it's the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH, N-I-O-S-H, World Trade Center Health Program, W-T-C-H-P site, and the information is very well laid out there on signing up on what's necessary. The other thing I found that's helpful for getting people in the program is the people in the centers are very, very knowledgeable about the program and know it in and out.

For example, at Sinai, we have folks who can and have and will guide people right through the signup process and so do all the other centers, and I'm sure of it certainly in New York City, and I'm almost certain that the survivor program sites Bellevue and Gouverneur and the rest have that ability to-- when they go to the website, somebody gets confused about what's going to go in there, what do I say? Is this where I fill in the blank with this? There are people all around who can talk you through that. Just don't get frustrated. Just keep going. It really does work. It really does go through.

If you're eligible, you really will get in because-- and particularly the survivor program, as I was saying earlier, you're a little bit underrepresented there. We want to get as best a picture as we possibly can of what happened with the survivor population. Just as now we have a fairly good, at least, idea of what's going on with the responder population. Get in there, sign up, come on in.

Brian Lehrer: Another text that came in, a listener writes, "My brother died 12 weeks in the pit. He was a welder who had actually helped build the World Trade Center high up in the air doing welding of those beams, and then he was working for the MTA on the day, and they were called in to try to first see if they could rescue anybody, but then to find anybody and then to prevent the river," as he calls it, "from coming in and to restore the MTA and the subways. He died within a year of lung cancer. I do wish they would not just list the names of the people who were in the building but also some of the names of the people who died as a consequence of trying to rescue."

I see, Dr. Crane, that Governor Hochul is said to be signing a bill today requiring businesses in the area with more than 50 people at that time, that's parts of Lower Manhattan and parts of Northern Brooklyn, to notify workers who they employed at the time, even now, that they may be eligible for health screenings and other benefits from the government. Are there certain people or people who worked in certain areas who you think should get certain screenings?

Dr. Michael Crane: Absolutely. If you were in a few block radius of the towers at any point during that time period of the cleanup, you really should have someone talk to you about the exposure and if at all possible, get into one of the programs. I would say that's a blanket across the board. If there was 400,000 people living in that area at the time, that means 400,000 people were exposed, at least to some degree. We really think that people should be asking the question of themselves talking to their families and if they were there one day in the following June on business, that's probably not the exposure we're talking about.

If you went into those offices, especially the ones with the broken windows with the incomplete cleanups day after day after day, that's a significant exposure and you should be getting checked. That is absolutely legitimate. The people who sign folks up for these programs will know that and step forward and help you.

Brian Lehrer: We have one minute left before we're going to end our conversation with you and join the 10:28 moment of silence, but we're getting a number of calls and texts asking a version of this question. Do you have any position on blaming the federal government, especially EPA director, Christine Whitman at the time, for saying it was safe enough, in environmental terms, to return to the area after a short period of time when they knew or should have known, in these listeners' opinions, that it wasn't?

Dr. Michael Crane: Yes, I think that was premature advice. I think the people who lived in the apartments knew very well that they had broken windows and other stuff from the force of the collapse and dust all over the place and that was just overlooked. That was not right. That was not a statement that should have been made.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Michael Crane, medical director of the World Trade Center Health Program and the Selikoff Centers for Occupational Health at Mount Sinai Hospital. He's been very involved in all of this and has been good enough to take some time from his day on 9/11, which I know also involves many related chapters to join us. Dr. Crane, thank you so much.

Dr. Michael Crane: Mr. Lehrer, a pleasure, truly.

Brian Lehrer: Now, as we come up to 10:28, we join the ceremony at Ground Zero for the sixth and final moment of silence, which commemorates when the North Tower fell. Oh, actually, I'm off by one minute. That moment of silence is at 10:29, which we will be joining, commemorating when the North Tower fell, and we are going to join it right at this moment.

[bell ringing]

[pause 00:29:29]

Speaker 6: Karen Ann Kincaid.

Speaker 7: Amy R. King.

Speaker 6: Andrew M. King.

Speaker 7: Lucille Teresa King.

Speaker 6: Robert King, Jr.

Speaker 7: Lisa King-Johnson.

Speaker 6: Brian K. Kinney.

Speaker 7: Takashi Kinoshita.

Speaker 6: Chris Michael Kirby.

Speaker 7: Robert Kirkpatrick.

Speaker 6: Howard Barry Kirschbaum.

Brian Lehrer: The reading of the 2,977 names continues live from the World Trade Center site, will continue live on The Brian Lehrer Show right after this.

 

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