The best way to honor firefighters and first responders, from 9/11 to Katrina, is to give care, look ahead
By Harold Schaitberger
Harold Schaitberger is general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents 275,000 professional firefighters and paramedics in the United States and Canada.
Newsday (New York)
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
We are rebuilding.
Our souls and our soil are works in progress, and the rehabilitation of our lives may take longer than the reconstruction of Ground Zero. Five years since the devastating terrorist attacks that claimed so many, Sept. 11 is still taking a toll on all of us.
Five years later - and four weeks since British and U.S. law enforcement arrested two dozen people in London suburbs accused of plotting once again to hijack and crash commercial airplanes - we pause to reflect.
Debilitating illnesses have stricken firefighters and others among the 40,000 people - police, building trades workers, sanitation personnel, victims, witnesses and others - who inhaled Ground Zero’s toxic soup of chemicals. New York firefighters have suffered enormously and labor just to breathe, living victims who battle violent symptoms of respiratory illness each day.
A new study found that more than 12,000 firefighters in New York lost 12 years’ worth of lung function in a year following the attacks. At least four responders have died to date, and cancer clusters are beginning to appear in others. New York firefighters have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and colon cancer, which we at the International Association of Fire Fighters believe is a direct result of the attacks. Seemingly every firehouse in the city has seen one of its family become ill.
We also deal with emotional pain. Firefighters still grieve over their lost brothers. But now we cope with that grief outside the glare of the TV cameras that tracked our every move for more than a year after Sept. 11, 2001.
The day will always present an emotional conundrum for firefighters across the nation: too painful to remember, but too grave to forget. We will always struggle with the tension posed by the need to remember fallen firefighters, and a desire to erase the horrific memories haunting us these past five years.
But our memories of those who perished on 9/11 can be a pillar of support for us, not a weight that holds us down.
Gov. George Pataki is doing his part to assist. He signed legislation last month granting more generous death benefits to relatives of city workers who took part in rescue and cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center site and who later die from specific cancers or respiratory illnesses. That bill means critical efforts are being made to care for families of victims.
Nationally, we must make preparedness our legacy and our memorial to those we lost.
It is appalling that two-thirds of our nation’s fire departments continue to operate with too few firefighters, which jeopardizes safety. Firefighters willingly put themselves in harm’s way to save lives, but they must have the resources to help them. Having enough firefighters is the key element in that equation, and more must be done at the federal level to ensure that happens.
Congress also must move forward with legislation for a medical monitoring program so federal health officials immediately begin a screening program to gauge the health of victims when a disaster strikes.
Sept. 11 should have underscored the need for a federal medical monitoring program, but Congress failed to act. When hurricanes struck the Gulf Coast last year, the federal government still had no means to monitor or administer treatment to those stuck in the toxic results.
The Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Centers for Disease Control told people in New Orleans and elsewhere to wash their hands if they touched polluted water. There was a clear warning of the potential health risk, but no plan for dealing with the medical consequences.
Not only did firefighters touch polluted water, they waded through it while rescuing scores of stranded residents, and then they went home to tend to their own destroyed property. Our union conducted medical monitoring of our members and anyone who came into our makeshift clinics, drawing blood to test for illnesses and giving baseline physicals. That should be the role of the federal government during a national disaster. In addition, a program should be established to measure the health effects over 30 years or more.
Congress has begun reforming the Federal Emergency Management Agency to improve its response to disasters, but lawmakers must also create a national credentialing system to get qualified firefighters systematically into a disaster area to save lives, rather than giving them secretarial duties as some were given during Hurricane Katrina.
As we struggle to rebuild, treatment and preparedness must be the legacy of Sept. 11, 2001. If we do it correctly, we can emerge even stronger.