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A word about Sept. 11, 2001 - 25 years later. And the day that launched my career. My first ever column was written about 9/11 and the heroes who emerged from its ashes. It was also the place where I thought I was literally going to die, just a few years later, as a result of the fallout.
In 2006, I moved into an apartment not far from Ground Zero, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed. 63 Wall Street. The only place where I could find any peace and quiet in Manhattan. They were still pulling human remains out of the ground years later. I only knew this because the workers would tell me.
In the years that I lived there - as I regularly walked by the giant crater in the ground en route to the movies or the supermarket - my hair fell out, my skin crawled and my thyroid gave out. The latter produced the scariest heart palpitations that I’ve ever had in my life. The number of times that I would be reading in bed and feel my heart stop for several seconds was so concerning that, had a wonderful, very experienced female doctor there (with her own radio show, of course) not figured it out, I can’t help but suspect that I probably wouldn’t be here. Natural causes would have probably been the verdict. Just a bad ticker. So shocking and sad for such a young person barely out of their 20s.
It wasn’t until I moved to Paris that all of that magically went away. I had long suspected that the whole area was still toxic for years afterwards. How could it not be? Everyone saw the dust produced when those buildings collapsed. Did you see a giant vacuum afterwards? I didn’t.
The extent of the toxicity was officially hidden from the public until just a few days ago, when NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani released previously undisclosed internal documents in which officials at the time “raised alarms regarding environmental testing … which regularly detected elevated levels of toxins, including asbestos and hard-to-detect, dangerous chemicals,” as CNN reported.
First responders fought for years for their resulting illnesses to be officially recognized. In the meantime, the official story stood. And anyone challenging the prevailing assurances was often treated as a distraction from those in charge who had better things to worry about - like exploiting the incident to usher in a technological panopticon and invade every resource-rich country imaginable under the pretext of “fighting them over there so they don’t come here.”
Granted, all of us were on board in the aftermath with whatever needed to be done to stop it from happening again.