In 2001 we were just beginning to recognize environmental factors as possibly causal.

This is a rare, serious inflammatory disease that affects the lungs primarily. At the time, it was considered a disease of unknown cause. But a cluster of four sarcoidosis cases was reported following 9/11, and that was surprising. The cancers and the asthma and bronchitis were not a big surprise.

Oliver: I think for me it was a wake-up call in terms of the types of diseases that have emerged related to these exposures – the chronic rhinosinusitis and the gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Singer: What environmental health lessons have been learned from 9/11 in the past 20 years? Here is an edited transcript of the conversation: Left to right: Miriam Diamond, Paul Bozek and Christine Oliver (Photos by Camilla Pucholt, Adam Coish and courtesy of Christine Oliver)įor answers, I turned to three environmental health experts at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health: Christine Oliver, an adjunct professor, was based in Boston on 9/11 and subsequently treated some of the first responders and studied their unique illnesses Professor Miriam Diamond immediately began putting together a team of graduate students from her U of T office who drove all night to lower Manhattan to measure contaminants in the air and Associate Professor Paul Bozek, an asbestos and PPE expert who still uses environmental health lessons from that day in his work helping to protect firefighters and others with high-risk jobs. Would firefighters today be taking deep breaths of asbestos and silica dust as they worked themselves to the bone trying to dig out victims? Would exhausted recovery workers taking the Staten Island ferry home in the middle of the night simply be told to take a hot shower and throw their dusty clothes in the laundry? Would I as a reporter have been allowed into Ground Zero at all? Twenty years later, I wonder what the experts have learned about the environmental health consequences of that terrible day – and whether much has changed. But now, facing a very different public health disaster, these memories give me courage to ask people to mask when they’re not following public health guidelines, or to engage the hesitant in dialogue about vaccination. The smoke and dust have followed me through the years, a constant reminder of the risks we take, many of them reckless. The undocumented immigrants who did the dirtiest work cleaning up the rubble, then struggled to get help for their ruined health. The firefighters I interviewed who could barely walk due to lung damage. Today, I’m haunted by the attack – the catastrophe, the lives lost, but also by the terrible health consequences that crept up on so many of us. A decade later, I was diagnosed with one of the cancers believed to be linked to 9/11 exposure. I developed “the cough” – an irritating constant hacking that first responders and residents of lower Manhattan got in those first weeks. I smelled it for two months afterward from my desk in the press room of city hall as the fires continued to burn nearby.

I breathed that dust all day and again two days later, working directly on the pile of debris, shovelling out the dead one bucket at a time. As I headed toward Ground Zero, he handed me a mask, saying, “Here, if you’re going in, at least take this.” I have no memory of using it. He tried to stop me, but I argued until he gave in. I showed him my press credentials allowing me to cross police lines. Or the dust that covered the blank-faced people marching home across the Brooklyn Bridge and powdered the silent, empty streets like fresh snow.Ī single police officer stood guard at the entrance to lower Manhattan. Nobody thought too hard about the white smoke. In those first few hours, we were terrified, wondering if the world was going to end. Normally congested streets were almost empty – people were pulled over in clumps, listening to the radio, learning about other attacks in other places. 11, 2001, and I was a reporter for the Staten Island Advance newspaper, living in Brooklyn. The top third of the second tower had just crumbled to the ground, and I was on my bike, pedalling as fast as possible to the World Trade Center. White smoke rolled in from lower Manhattan, wrapping the Brooklyn waterfront in a sudden haze. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Heidi Singer, director of communications at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, recounts her personal experience with the tragedy and its aftermath before sitting down with three environmental health experts – Miriam Diamond, Paul Bozek and Christine Oliver – to talk about lingering health impacts and lessons learned.

911 aftermath