Two decades later, 9/11 hasn’t finished claiming its silent victims

Photos: Jeff Zorabedian

It’s a gorgeous October morning, not too hot or cold, the leaves only starting to think about turning colors and the sky a deep shade of blue. In fact, the weather was just this beautiful on the September morning when I returned from my children’s bus stop to get a phone call from my husband telling me a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. True, I was in Brooklyn on 9/11, not lower Manhattan. I didn’t see anybody jump from a burning building, or race to flee the advancing cloud of smoke. I watched the towers implode on my Italian neighbor’s television, while my children gathered burned scraps of paper that had floated into our yard.

But picture-perfect autumn days still trigger a little spike of anxiety, as I half expect something sinister to shatter the scene — and I’m not the only one. My sense of unease is shared by Dr. Marc Wilkenfeld, a specialist in occupational and environmental medicine, whose career for the last 20 years has been dominated by the effort to treat and advocate for patients with medical conditions brought on by exposure to 9/11 toxins.

“What a nice day — exactly like the weather on 9/11,” he offers as we stand in the leafy park built at Ground Zero. “It always makes me sad to come here, especially around this time of year.” While two decades have passed since that horrifying morning, for Dr. Wilkenfeld, 9/11 is never over. As Chief of Occupational Medicine and Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU-Langone in Long Island, he still sees patients suffering from the aftereffects.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website estimates that about 400,000 people were exposed to toxins, injury, or emotional trauma in the period during and after 9/11. Dr. Wilkenfeld explains the nature of those toxins: “You had tremendous heat, thousands of degrees, and incinerating chemicals creating compounds we’d never even seen before,” he says. “There was diesel and concrete burning. There were 5,000 tons of asbestos, a known carcinogen, in the first tower alone. There was silica and mercury dioxin — known as Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls, highly toxic industrial compounds — in the fumes. At that time, lead was used in computer monitors, and that burned as well.”

Dr. Wilkenfeld, who lives in Great Neck, was working at a clinic at Bellevue Hospital-affiliate Gouverneur Hospital in Chinatown after 9/11, where he immediately began seeing locals from Chinatown, the housing projects, and first responders who had developed “WTC cough” and respiratory problems like asthma.

“Concrete has a low pH, which meant the smoke from it burned people’s lungs and sinuses,” Dr. Wilkenfeld says. “It traveled to the stomach as well, creating reflux. At least 20 percent of the firefighters who worked at 9/11 had respiratory issues and were unable to work again.”

The towers didn’t stop burning until the end of January 2002, and the final loads of debris weren’t carted out until the end of May; the risk of disease has been directly correlated to the amount of time spent on the burning pile of rubble or within the asphalt cloud.