Today marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. A quarter century since 2,977 people were killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A quarter century since the rest of us watched, and grieved, and then had to figure out how to go on.
Twenty-five years is long enough that the children who were in downtown classrooms that morning have children of their own now. It is long enough that most people encountering this attack for the first time were not alive to see it happen. It is a real milestone, and it deserves a real pause.
But there is a second anniversary buried inside this one, and it is the reason our firm exists. September 11 did not stop claiming lives when the fires went out. It has kept claiming them, slowly, for twenty-five years, and it is not finished.
The toll that came after
The World Trade Center Health Program has certified more than 57,000 people for a 9/11-related cancer over its history. Cancer is now the single most common condition in the program, ahead of the respiratory and digestive illnesses that defined its first decade.
That shift happened because cancers take years, sometimes decades, to appear after an exposure like this one, and a quarter century is long enough for nearly every one of those illnesses to have surfaced.
The FDNY’s own accounting, released this month for the anniversary, puts the number of its members lost to 9/11-related illness at more than 600. That is more than the 343 members the department lost on the day itself.
And this year, for the first time, the WTC Health Program’s data crossed a line that has never been crossed before: survivors — the people who lived, worked, or went to school in the affected area — now outnumber responders who worked the pile and handled the debris among those certified for a 9/11-related cancer. We wrote about that shift last week.
It means that the people this attack has harmed are not just responders and rescue workers. They are the accountants, delivery drivers, teachers and ninth-graders who went back to school four weeks later because they were told the air was safe. The reach of 9/11 was, and still is, far larger than the picture most of us still carry in our heads.
Why the anniversary does not mean it is over
Congress understood this when it reauthorized the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund in 2019. It set the Fund’s claim filing deadline at October 1, 2090, eighty-nine years after the attack, because the government’s own medical projections showed that cancers with long latency periods, mesothelioma most of all, would keep appearing for decades to come.
Twenty-five of those eighty-nine years have passed. Measured against what the law itself expects, we are not yet a third of the way through.
That is not a discouraging fact. It is a commitment, made in writing by the country, that no one exposed on that day or in the months after will find that it’s too late to be helped. It is why this work continues long after the news cycle around each anniversary fades.
What this anniversary is for
Today, the bells toll in Lower Manhattan and the names are read, six times as they always have. This year, for the first time, there is a seventh moment of silence — for the people who survived September 11 itself and were taken later by what it left behind. We wrote about that change when it was announced, and it is an update that was a long time coming.
I have spent more than thirteen years representing people in these claims. Firefighters and construction workers. Office workers and students. Family members filing on behalf of someone who did not live to see their case resolved.
What I have learned from that work is that most of them do not think of themselves as victims of September 11. They apologize for calling. They explain, almost sheepishly, that they were not on the pile, that they were just downtown, just at school, just doing their job, and ask whether that even counts.
It counts. It was never only about the pile.
Twenty-five years from now, someone at our firm will still be having that conversation, because the law expects it and the illnesses keep arriving on their own schedule. That is not a burden we carry reluctantly. It is the reason this firm exists, and it is what we will keep doing.
On this anniversary, we remember the 2,977 people killed on September 11, 2001. We remember the thousands who have died since of illnesses that day caused. And to everyone still living with what that morning left behind — still sick, still waiting, still not sure whether their story counts — we will keep representing you for as long as it takes.
