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Weekly UpdatesEven now, more than seven years later, images of that day remain frightfully raw, in large measure because a legion of photographers and journalists made the unimaginable events of September 11, 2001, all too real. Some happened to be in lower Manhattan when the first plane struck that morning. Some arrived as the first tower collapsed. Others called in favors so they could slip under police barricades or fly over the debris pile while the fires raged. All of them considered themselves lucky to have been able to get so close to the biggest story of their lives.
But their luck also marked them. Being close enough to the tragedy to capture the horror put them close enough to breathe in the dust that exploded with hurricane force from the obliterated towers. Close enough to have the dust work its way into their bodies just as the images of that day worked their way into their minds and hearts.
Several scientific studies have linked the dust--as corrosive as drain cleaner--to a range of medical problems, some chronic and some life-threatening. The tsunami of dust engulfed everyone who was there that day. Some were left with disabilities that curtailed or ended their careers. Some carry physical and emotional scars that they rarely speak about.
Gary Fabiano, a freelance photographer, had been downtown shooting polling booths for what had started out as primary-election day in New York. He was heading back to his agency's office when a call came in on his cell, and he turned right around. He got so close to the towers that when he looked up, he could not see the top of the building coming down at him. But he heard it. "It was like an avalanche of steel and concrete, the steel snapping, the concrete grinding," he says. "It went completely black, then dead silent."
Fabiano and a New York City firefighter tried to outrun the dust cloud. They took shelter in the loading dock of 7 World Trade Center, a building that hours later would also collapse. "There was so much soot and what the fireman told me was pure asbestos in the air we were breathing," he says. "If you took vacuum bags, filled them up with dust and emptied them down your throat, that's pretty much what it felt like."
Besides tons of ground-up concrete, the 9/11 dust clouds contained a toxic brew of compounds--including asbestos, lead, benzene, and mercury--that scientists continue to study. What we know so far is that exposure, even for a relatively short time, could burn breathing passages and cause permanent damage. The dust contaminated lungs and could lead to scarring diseases, like fibrosis and sarcoidosis. While the scientific link between dust and disease has not yet been proven with absolute certainty, the dust has been connected to underweight babies born in lower Manhattan, and to a sharp increase in asthma among adults. And the fallout hasn't been limited to physical ailments. A high percentage of individuals caught in the dust cloud developed post-traumatic stress.
Of course, ground-zero journalists are not alone in falling victim to the dust. Hundreds of uniformed responders--police and fire and emergency medical technicians--have left their jobs on permanent disability. Thousands of construction workers who cleared the site, most of the time without the protection of any kind of respirator mask, are suing the city because they got sick. And for thousands who lived, worked, or went to school in the shell-shocked neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, the dust infiltrated nearly every inch of their lives.
But what sets journalists apart from the others is that, by and large, they have not been treated like victims, either because of their own denials or because the system does not consider them responders, even though they--like cops and firefighters--rushed toward the doomed buildings as everyone else ran away from them. Some have had to fight with their employers for help, arguing with human-resources officers and compensation lawyers who refused to link illness to dust. Some have simply not told their supervisors they were hurt, fearing that acknowledging an ailment or asking for time off would break a newsroom ethos. "I was astounded to learn that the stigma and shame attached to acknowledging any emotional stress was even greater for journalists than it was for policemen, firefighters, and other emergency responders," says Elana Newman, a psychologist and director of research for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, which addresses the coverage of tragedies and the impact that such coverage has on journalists. Newman and Dart ran a trauma center for ground-zero journalists in 2002. She says that she spent time talking with a broad range of people who survived the disaster, but found that journalists were the least willing to talk about their feelings. Getting them to come to the formal group sessions she organized proved difficult, so she eventually had to conduct meetings in bars and an East Village photography gallery. "Journalists do see themselves as different," she says.
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Take Bolivar Arellano, a senior photographer for the New York Post who rushed to the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, arriving in time to photograph people falling a thousand feet to their deaths. When the first tower collapsed, Arellano was directly beneath it and shot pictures of it coming down on top of him. He escaped, but was back by the time the second tower collapsed. This time he was blown off his feet and knocked unconscious. When he came to, his right leg was torn open at the knee. "When I got up I must have had ten pounds of dust on my back," Arellano says, during a recent interview on the east side of Manhattan, near where he lives. "I thought, 'I survived the collapse but now I'm going to die by the dust and ash.'"
Arellano recovered and went back to work. But he wasn't the same. He developed a dry cough that never really went away. He lost his balance, and more. "I also started having emotional problems but I was afraid to say anything to the editors," he says, and that included his son, Juan, the Post's photo editor. In his native Ecuador, Arellano had covered a massacre of students, and he photographed victims in El Salvador during the war there. But 9/11 had scarred his heart as well as his leg. "I couldn't tell anyone that I cried day and night thinking of those people jumping," he says. "They would think that I was an emotionally unstable person."
Arellano eventually received a monetary settlement from the federal government's September 11 Victim Compensation Fund for the injury to his leg. His knee healed, but his breathing problems and emotional stress have never gone away. Four years ago, he retired from journalism. "Last week I was coughing like a dog--that same dry cough as always," Arellano says. "I live with the fear that I'm going to choke and not be able to breathe." He is sixty-four.
Freelancers have been even more reluctant than staffers like Arellano to admit their troubles to editors and colleagues, certain that turning down an assignment that they are no longer physically capable of doing, or asking for less-stressful assignments, would hurt their careers. "I will never tell them I am sick--never--for the simple reason that I am disposable," says Philippe Gassot, a fifty-two-year-old freelancer who in 2001 was a correspondent for French TV based in Washington, D.C. On the morning of September 11, he sped up I-95, arriving at ground zero by late afternoon when the air was still opaque with dust and smoke. For the next month, he was at ground zero every day, filming pieces and transmitting them to France.
Gassot flew back to France for Christmas that year, and colleagues there who had seen the huge dust clouds on TV urged him to see a doctor. During the examination, the doctor found that his lung capacity had dropped by 10 percent. Three years later he took a stress test. "The doctor asked me when I had had a heart attack," Gassot says. He thought the doctor was mistaken. "I was always in good health before; I never had any problems, never saw a doctor. Suddenly, I had all kinds of problems, and they put a stent in my vein."
Gassot did stories on the ground-zero workers who signed up for screening and monitoring at the Mount Sinai Medical Center's World Trade Center programs, which are looking after more than 20,000 people who inhaled trade-center dust. But he never enrolled himself because he didn't want to take a chance of someone finding out about his condition.
A few years ago, New York State changed its workers' compensation system to help workers who had been injured at ground zero. Typically, a claim must be filed within two years of a work-related injury. But illnesses caused by exposure to contaminants, such as those found in the trade-center dust, may not develop until years later. The legislature enacted special provisions to give people who might not be sick now until 2010 to register for the right to file claims far into the future. Everyone who worked on the rescue and recovery operations at ground zero in 2001 and 2002 was covered by the extended deadline. But not journalists.
That bothered David Handschuh, a forty-nine-year-old New York Daily News photographer who was caught in the debris from the collapsing south tower. His right leg was shattered, and he developed post-traumatic stress that prevents him from shooting hard news even now. He went to the state workers' compensation board and asked why journalists and photographers were not covered. "They said it was because the legislation does not specifically include members of the media," Handschuh says.
Joseph Cavalcante, a spokesman for the workers' compensation board, says that's true, but that journalists can file the registration form (called a WTC-12) anyway. This way, he says, if the law changes they will be covered. Handschuh acknowledges that getting the legislature to revisit the law and include journalists is a long shot, but he is putting together a case that may end up helping. He has posted a four-page questionnaire on the Web site of the New York Press Photographers Association, asking for specifics about who worked at ground zero, and how doing so has affected them. He has amassed the most comprehensive set of data about photographers and journalists who were injured on 9/11.
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