The Other War
My fight to secure health care for 9/11 heroes
Lila Nordstrom was a student at Stuyvesant HS in downtown Manhattan when the 9/11 terror attacks struck just three blocks away. Unbeknownst to Lila and her classmates, they would come to face a health crisis that threatened their future. In her new memoir, “Some Kids Left Behind” (Apollo Publishers), from which this column was adapted, Lila describes her 20-year battle to get health care for 9/11 survivors:
ON the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the sound of an explosion shook my classroom on the 10th floor of Stuyvesant High School, on the corner of Chambers and West streets.
When I turned around to look outside, a huge fireball had engulfed the North Tower of the World Trade Center. A student popped in from the room next door and announced that a plane had hit the tower.
The first 15 minutes of the disaster felt like hours. Eventually a voice over the loudspeaker broke the silence and told us to stay put. A few minutes later, something with wings pierced the shadow of the fires. It was a plane. We heard another huge explosion. Then the first tower fell, as we just sat there. A few minutes later, the evacuation orders finally came: “Head north.”
I stepped onto the street as the second building fell, running as fast as I could for as long as I could. I wound up walking to Astoria with a friend — 10 miles from the school and seven miles from my home in Chelsea.
After 10 days out of school, we were moved to a Brooklyn building for a couple of weeks. But soon after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman declared, “The air is safe to breathe,” the Stuy students were sent back downtown.
On Oct. 9, our first day back, I walked to school with my classmates — some in dust masks, others shielding their mouths and noses with scarves, most just breathing in the acrid stench. We coughed. It reeked like a burning chemical plant. I’ve never smelled anything like it before or since.
As fires continued to burn at Ground Zero, city officials assured our parents the building was safe, saying they had spent $1 million to clean it.
School administrators told us the auditorium was safe despite the carpet and seat upholstery not having been replaced. In mid-2002, some parents sent a piece of that carpet to a lab, which found it was heavily contaminated with asbestos.
Just beyond our windows, a barge collecting Ground Zero debris operated all day next to our air-intake system. The city had gotten a special waiver from Gov. George Pataki to put the boat there.
A few weeks later, there were widespread complaints among students: bloody noses, headaches, breathing problems and chronic coughing. Then-principal Stanley Teitel told a Parents Association meeting that if students left school for health reasons, we could not return or graduate with a Stuyvesant diploma. My parents were shocked. Men in hazmat suits began walking into classes with air meters.
In 2003 the EPA Inspector General found the agency “did not have sufficient data and analysis” to have swiftly declared the downtown air safe. In 2016, Whitman finally apologized to those harmed; by then, I had been speaking for 10 years about the dangers we had faced.
In early 2006, I started a petition after the death of NYPD officer James Zadroga, the first person to officially die of 9/11-related illness — arguing that Stuy
students had faced the same risks. But it was all theoretical until classmate Amit Friedander told me he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and thought it might be related to 9/11. That felt like a bomb dropping.
As news about the ailments of 9/11’s heroic first responders grew increasingly grim, at least 20 Stuyvesant graduates developed cancer — lymphomas, as well as thyroid, stomach and breast cancers. My own asthma worsened, and I developed GERD, a digestive disorder common among Ground Zero workers.
Along with many former classmates, I joined the fight for passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act in 2010, 2015 and 2019 — the same year we lost 33-year-old Stuyvesant grad Catherine Choy, a sophomore on 9/11, to gastric cancer.
That June, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee, alongside Jon Stewart and dying NYPD Det. Louis Alvarez, about the experience of 9/11’s students. I made sure our representatives knew Cathy’s name.
An estimated 35,000 children were living or attending school downtown during the WTC cleanup, along with 25,000 college students. For the last 15 years, StuyHealth, the organization I founded in 2006, has helped hundreds apply to the WTC Health Program or file a claim with the federal Victim Compensation Fund.
It took decades of fighting to win a permanent 9/11 health program. Victims of future disasters should not have to wait so long.