9/11 fund of $7.3b running dry
The compensation fund for victims of 9/11 is running out of money and will cut future payments by 50 to 70 per cent, United States officials announced yesterday.
September 11 Victim Compensation Fund special master Rupa Bhattacharyya said she was “painfully aware of the inequity of the situation” but stressed that awarding some funds for every valid claim would be preferable to sending some legitimate claimants away emptyhanded.
“I could not abide a plan that would at the end of the day leave some claimants uncompensated.”
Nearly 40,000 people have applied to the federal fund for people with illnesses potentially related to being at the World Trade Centre site, the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the 2001 terror attacks there, and about 19,000 of those claims are pending. Nearly $5 billion in benefits have been awarded out of the $7.3b fund.
Bhattacharyya said fund officials estimate it would take another $5b to pay pending claims and the claims officials anticipate will be submitted before the fund’s December 2020 deadline.
Absent that funding, officials determined that pending claims submitted by February 1 would be paid at 50 per cent of their prior value. Valid claims received after that date will be paid at just 30 per cent.
Members of Congress responded to yesterday’s announcement by vowing to reauthorise the fund.
They said they would introduce legislation to make the compensation fund permanent and to compensate all legitimate claimants.
The collapse of the trade centre in 2001 sent a cloud of thick dust billowing over Lower Manhattan. Fires burned for weeks. Thousands of construction workers, police officers, firefighters and others spent time working in the soot, often without proper respiratory protection.
In the 17 years since, many have experienced a health decline, some with respiratory or digestive-system ailments that appeared almost immediately, others with illnesses that developed as they aged, including cancer. Scientists can’t say definitively whether toxins at the site gave people cancer, but researchers have raised concern at an unusual number of suicides among first responders and more deaths than expected from brain cancers and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.