Our Story

For Christopher J. Baione, "there" was Staten Island, two miles from the Fresh Kills Landfill, where the rubble of the World Trade Center was barged for sorting through the fall of 2001 and into the summer of 2002. He grew up watching his neighbors leave for work at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills, and come home covered in toxic dust that no one warned them about. NYPD officers. FDNY firefighters. DSNY sanitation workers. Iron workers. Volunteers. The people on his block.

They were there because they had to be. Or because they wanted to help. Or because they lived and worked and went to school in the place that became Ground Zero. There were over 400,000 of them.

This firm exists because of those people.

Christopher was named after his grandfather, FDNY Lieutenant Christopher J. Baione, who died of cancer attributed to inadequate safety regulations during the New York Telephone Company Fire. The pattern of public servants getting sick from work the government failed to protect them from is not new. It is, in his family, generational.

Seven days after the towers fell, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency stood in Lower Manhattan and told America the air was safe to breathe. It wasn't.

"I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink."

Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator — September 18, 2001

What was actually in the air — pulverized concrete, asbestos, lead, dioxin, mercury, jet fuel, benzene, PCBs, the chemical signature of every building and every body — would not be fully understood for years. By then, the people who had returned to their offices, their classrooms, their apartments, and their recovery shifts at the pile had already breathed it in. So had the children who went back to school at Stuyvesant. So had the residents who slept with their windows open because the smell never really left.

Years later, the neighbors Christopher grew up watching come home from Ground Zero and Fresh Kills started developing respiratory illnesses, lung disease, and cancer. They were not first responders in the way the news told the story. Many of them were sanitation workers, volunteers, office workers, students. They were told they were safe. They were not.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund exists because Congress eventually acknowledged what the EPA denied. The World Trade Center Health Program exists for the same reason. The work of this firm is built on that acknowledgment, and on the conviction that the people who were lied to are owed the full measure of what the law now provides.

More than 70 conditions are now linked to 9/11 toxin exposure. Cancers across nearly every organ system. Aerodigestive and respiratory diseases, including COPD, asthma, chronic rhinosinusitis, GERD, and interstitial lung disease. Mental health conditions including PTSD and major depression. Acute injuries from the day itself.

Most people who qualify don't know they qualify. They think the VCF is only for first responders. They think their cancer can't be related because it's been twenty-five years. They think they missed a deadline that may not exist. They think filing means a lawsuit. None of that is true.

The health program and the fund are open through 2090. There is no cap on awards. There is no lawsuit. Eligibility for certain benefits extends to anyone who was present in the NYC Exposure Zone — Lower Manhattan south of Houston, parts of Brooklyn, the Fresh Kills site, plus the Pentagon and Shanksville — between September 11, 2001 and July 31, 2002, and who later developed a certified condition. Office workers qualify. Students qualify. Residents qualify. Volunteers qualify. Family members of those who have passed can file too.

If you got sick, the system Congress built was built for you. The hard part is getting through it, and getting the full award you're owed — not a fraction of it.